I’d like to personally apologize for the quality of the Lightroom 6.2 release we shipped on Monday. The team cares passionately about our product and our customers and we failed on multiple fronts with this release. In our efforts to simplify the import experience we introduced instability that resulted in a significant crashing bug. The scope of that bug was unclear and we made the incorrect decision to ship with the bug while we continued to search for a reproducible case(Reproducible cases are essential for allowing an engineer to solve a problem). The bug has been fixed and today’s update addresses the stability of Lightroom 6.

The simplification of the import experience was also handled poorly. Our customers, educators and research team have been clear on this topic: The import experience in Lightroom is daunting. It’s a step that every customer must successfully take in order to use the product and overwhelming customers with every option in a single screen was not a tenable path forward. We made decisions on sensible defaults and placed many of the controls behind a settings panel. At the same time we removed some of our very low usage features to further reduce complexity and improve quality. These changes were not communicated properly or openly before launch. Lightroom was created in 2006 via a 14 month public beta in a dialog with the photography community. In making these changes without a broader dialog I’ve failed the original core values of the product and the team.

The team will continue to work hard to earn your trust back in subsequent releases and I look forward to reigniting the type of dialog we started in 2006.

Sincerely,

Tom Hogarty and the Lightroom Management Team

Update October 12, 2015: With 432 comments and counting I just wanted to let folks know that I’m reading all of the feedback and the team will provide an update this week.

to TH: Since the feature worked perfectly and has for many versions, it seems really unlikely there was any current issue with quality of the feature or effort to bring it up to standards that would lead to dropping the feature.

To TH: Well, that’s reason enough to not ujpdate Lightroom in the future, and I’m thankful I missed this one. Things work great for me. Instead of engineers, why not test stuff out with photographers, since that’s who’ll be using it?

I’m genuinely curious because a lot of the comments here are mentioning the auto-eject feature: why would you use this feature? What’s the benefit? I purposefully don’t use it because after I import my photos, I open up the card via Explorer and delete everything on it. Formatting via the camera is much slower.

I understand it’s upsetting when a feature you use gets removed, but most modern programs track which features get used, and which don’t, so the product managers can make informed decisions.

Careful Tim! If you don’t do things exactly the same as the others here, they jump all over you, criticize you, and mock you for asking a polite question. There are some seriously rude, ignorant people here!

First off, formatting in my Nikon D750 is very fast. But in my Sony RX100 Mark IV, it takes almost 60 seconds. So, yes, I do find that to be a little tiresome – especially since the Sony has pretty weak battery life. In general though, I don’t format in my cameras constantly. And, no, I haven’t ever had a problem. Maybe if some of you have had corrupt images, you’d feel more sensitive to this issue – that’s OK. But don’t slam me because I don’t do things the way you do.

I am not a pro, so some of you are right, maybe if I was shooting for a living I’d have a different workflow. But do you all realize there’s an option to make a second copy upon import? When I import pictures, it automatically makes a second copy to my Synology NAS, which is protected with drive redundancy. So, no, I don’t care about keeping the photos on the cards. If you do, cool – do whatever works for you. But don’t trash me because I have a different workflow than you do.

Lastly, now that I’ve seen the new importer (I hadn’t when I first posted here, which was why I asked about it), I agree its a disaster. For me, the loss of the auto-eject wasn’t personally a big deal. But the UI of the importer looks like something out of Elements. It’s garish, incredibly slow to draw on the screen of my new Dell XPS 13…it’s the most bloated, unstable piece of code I’ve seen in Lightroom in years (it’s crashed on me twice, bringing down Lightroom with it). So I’m very glad to hear that Adobe will be taking it out – that thing needed some serious beta testing and photographer feedback before being unleashed.

I read a very interesting and quite technical explanation a while back on how deleting with computer works versus in-camera formatting. In camera formatting didn’t seem to be the sensible thing to do after knowing more about the processes involved and was indeed recommended against doing so as a matter of course.

I’d link to it but it was on a FB pro-photography page and it’d be a challenge to find anyway.

If that’s your reason for not using the feature, you might want to rethink your workflow.

First, while chances for data corruption or problems on any one given shoot are low, if one goes long periods without formatting their cards, and also not ejecting them properly, there is a small but non-negligible chance that data corruption or other problems could occur over time. If you are just playing around with your camera for fun, then it probably doesn’t matter much to you, but as someone who depends on my cameras to deliver the goods for my clients, I format before every shoot–better to be safe then sorry..Same thing with auto-eject–unless something is writing to the card, the chances for data corruption are extremely slim, but I’ve had some times where Magic Lateran refused to boot after not ejecting a card properly.

I’m not sure what camera system you are referring to, but every one I’ve used has taken less time (both for the user and the operation itself) to do so then manually opening them up in MultiCommander (not to mention Explorer) selecting everything, deleting it, and then emptying the trash. In fact, I’ve seen several users cite the increased speed/ease of this method as why they choose to format over delete, data integrity notwithstanding.

Finally, as a good practice (and probably more important than always formatting or ejecting) I keep my photos on the cards until I’ve backed my ingested photos up at least 1-2 other places, using a fresh set in camera if needed. Deleting them right away, unless you back them up immediately via LR import as opposed to syncing everything after. is not a good practice. Doesn’t happen often but it’s saved my butt a couple of times, most recently when I had a bunch of DNGs for a major gig get mysteriously corrupted not too long after import and had to ingest them off the cards again–considering they were at dozens of the client’s properties all around a major city, this simple practice saved me hours upon hours of reshooting.

And when it comes to analytics, all the experienced/pro users I know turn those off or block them via FW, so it could explain why the proportion of people who use certain features is drastically underrepresented, particularly among the core/dedicated userbase.

I am agreeing on all topics you covered and would like to hear an explanation why Adobe would remove any feature that is simply working. It cannot be the 100kb of file-size increase.
Same annoying practice on removing filters in PS that have been around since the beginning and fell short due to some usability feedback I have not once allowed to submit data like any other pro I know. And since Adobe – at least in my mind – is a company which manufactures software for pros, I would love to them to ask the pro community before removing any working feature that might impact the workflow or result and therefore impact our income in one way or the other.

Formatting in camera is quick and easy. Besides, you might not want to straight away. Ejecting the card is however vital and this was an excellent feature I used every time! What harm was it doing, that they would remove it?

Jason, I guess besides not using the ONE feature of this software that kept you from accidentally corrupting a memory card by pulling it out too soon, you then show your ignorance by ignoring EVERY camera manufacturer’s statement about NEVER formatting a memory card EXCEPT in the CAMERA! You LIKE playing “Russian Roulette” don’t you!
Oh yeah! Formatting is SO SLOW on my Nikon’s! I have to push two buttons – twice in q and 32 – 64GB cards are blanked in a “heart beat”.

@ Jason Dunn: Auto-eject benefits me because my workflow is different than yours. I import from the card via Lightroom, the card is ejected, the next card goes in, etc. The images stay on the cards until they’re backed up to other hard drives. Lightroom’s automatic ejection saves me time and helps prevent possible corruption of files if the card is removed without ejection. I never delete files from the card, either in camera or in the computer. Instead, the cards get formatted in the camera. With Nikon’s “two-button” format, it takes about 10 seconds per card, if that, and the card is properly formatted with any bad sectors written out.

The modern program tracking is that thing I always disable, so the decisions that product managers make are not necessarily informed.

Thank you for the rational, non-angry response Rick. Makes sense to me, and everyone’s workflow is different.

For me though, when I import files into Lightroom, within a few seconds, Cubby starts copying over any new files to another computer on my network. And I also create a second copy upon import to my NAS. So my lack of using the eject feature is neither foolhardy nor reckless like some people here seem to think. I have three copies of the imported DNG files by the time the import is finished.

I do think though that once a feature is introduced, and people rely upon it (especially pros) a company has to have a REALLY GREAT REASON for taking it out. Adobe clearly should have left it in based on the response here.

Formatting in the camera is not slow.
Camera manufacturers emphatically recommend formatting the card in the camera to avoid corruption issues.
Plus, why would you erase the card anyway before you know you have your images backed up?
What planet are you living on?

Well Ed, I’m glad you asked: when I import files into Lightroom, within a few seconds, a program called Cubby starts copying over any new files to another computer on my network. And I also create a second copy upon import to my NAS, which has full drive failure redundancy. So my lack of using the eject feature is neither foolhardy nor reckless like you here seem to think. I have three copies of the imported DNG files by the time the import is finished.

If you’re not using tools to automate immediate replication of your images upon import, that’s your problem, not mine. If you like the auto-eject tool, great. Use it. But don’t trash someone else who doesn’t happen to use it. That’s rude.

Just what I was going to say. I have turned off as much of the analytics in CC and Win10 as I can find. A friend even disconnects from the Internet while using CC – only connects now and again for email. We need to keep LR focussed on doing what we want, not wasting time doing what you want!

So your analytics will be heavily biased in favour of those who don’t know what is going on in their computers.

Respectfully Bob, by turning off telematics features in software, you’re opting out of having your feedback count toward the product future. I purposefully opt-in to every feedback option there is, because I know how that feedback gets used. And I most certainly know what’s going on with my computer, so please don’t generalize.

If you chose to opt out, that’s fine, but it’s a lot like voting: you can’t complain about who gets elected if you didn’t vote. 🙂

This!
I’m particularly frustrated to see the “Move” option removed from the import process. I extract all my photos from the camera using Canon’s EOS Utility and then I use LR to add these images to my catalogue, moving them to the correct folder as part of the import workflow.
I would like to see this reinstated please.
Kind Regards,
James

This, this, this. This is a huge takeaway from Adobe from this debacle.

Thanks to the privacy-invasion excesses of major companies like Adobe, Facebook, and Google, plus the less-than-stellar history Adobe has with writing code that doesn’t have security issues, a lot of people will disable the “phone home” provisions of software right away. That’s especially true after the Snowden revelations.

Then right out of the gate he replies and says they don’t care what you say. “We have in-product analytics that measures feature usage and blah blah blah” – NOT LISTENING. “Listen pal, we measure things ourselves and will tell you what is what” HOLY FAIL.

Sad, pathetic, and true

This is not a commitment to listen, it’s a PR stunt – users should shut up and take what the gods throw down – THEY HAVE SPOKEN.

I agree fully with David. And if it is true that the usage of eject the card after import is low, then it is because people haven’t found it. I’ve been using this for as long as I can remember. It is a time saver, and it makes sure you dont accidentally corrupt you card by removing without ejecting. Since the upgrade of lightroom I’ve been in several high-pace shooting situations, and it my heart jumps everytime I rip the card out without ejecting it because I forget that the feature is gone. And if I remember I still have to move from lightroom to a finder window, eject the card and then move back to lightroom. Who in their right mind would think this is simplifying?

We now have Lightroom for DUMMIES! You’ve taken away the functionality of IMPORT and now it is worthless. Whoever designed and whoever authorized this should be sent to Time Out.

Give us some kind of an option to have the older, and superior, import dialog back. Are you trying to make it so simple that it’s worthless? You’ve done a good job. All of the functionality is now gone.

There’s an old adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Well, then geniuses at Adobe have really messed this one up!!!!

We Adobe Lightroom users are in the position of drug users whose dealer has decided to “cut” the strength of his product. Over the years, we have become so addicted (invested time and effort) that we cannot go elsewhere (change products). And there is nothing that we can do about it!

Hopefully, we will learn from this experience and try not to make the same mistake again (at least not with Adobe).

Thank you for the apology, but I must concur with David Madison’s statement. Several of the things you moved had me scratching my head, but removing the option to automatically eject the card was one that just shocked me. It seems like such a silly move. Perhaps your data shows it to be an under-utilized feature, but that could well be because it is a feature that is not well-known. I discovered it by accident several versions ago and it’s been turned on – and a life-saver – ever since. I would say that those of us that know the feature exists, depend on it. I intend to hold off updating my LR CC2015 because of that feature alone. Please, please put it back – doing such a small thing will get you much more respect – – and appreciation – than you can possibly know.

Jason – Auto Eject is a “Life Saver”. You can immediately take the ejected card and place back into the camera – and continue shooting if you choose to do so. You risk corrupting the card if not properly ejected. Ever take pictures of a wedding with a corrupted card? Formatting the card in the camera is much faster than via the computer in my house. Too many mouse clicks and every camera manufacture I know encourages/recommends that the card is formatted in the camera

1) You can’t corrupt a card that hasn’t been written to.
2) Even if it’s been written to, USB mass storage devices do not buffer writes unless you enable this in device manager and THERE IS NO USECASE FOR DOING THIS WITH A FlashDrive or SDCARD unless you are using it as a general purpose drive and then, only if you are editing files directly on the card.

Check out Laura Shoe’s and others websites for their comments regarding damaging files without properly ejecting a memory card. Also personal experience validates my point – or were my corrupted files just a figment of my imagination? Please bring back the features/functionality that was removed. It took me less than 5 minutes to figure out the import dialog from scratch. What kind of monkeys do your testing?

The default behavior of both Windows and Mac actually write information to the card every single time you open it. There is metadata stored in the file system directory which is updated, and because you are updating the directory data you actually have a significantly higher chance of data corruption.
For this reason Mac and Windows both warn you of possible corruption if you remove the card without “ejecting” it.

Tom, thanks for your apology.
The point is, I use every single step of the “old” Import panels, including “move” and the directory tree with the +(and italics) folder to be created. PLEASE give us back our so much used options on Import?

Tom,
The import dialog was indeed complex but not dauntingly so. As others have pointed out, many of the removed features were an essential convenience which made the Lightroom workflow so useful for busy photographers.

The new import dialog has inconsistent scaling on high-DPI displays (some text is almost too small to read, a problem which Photoshop recently fixed and Lightroom never used to have), perverts long-standing Lightroom conventions (‘dimmed’ means photos are selected, unlike elsewhere in Lightroom), hides important information about the photos to import (the ‘photo selected’ overlay obscures the central third of the photo) and about the outcome of the import (where the photos will be going after import), and requires me to do more work myself (without the ‘move’ option, I now have to open up a file window to delete photos after importing).

Please, please, please, absorb some lessons from this mistake: that many people depend for their livelihood on the work you do, that in-software instrumentation is not the same as feedback, and that simpler is not always better.

I agree with Mikhael. I prefer being able to navigate and create folders in the directory tree within LR, and to move files instead of copying. The new interface is clunky, lacks options, and is just plain dumb. What were you people thinking? Yes, people make mistakes. The true measure of character is how one rights their wrongs.

I concur. I too use most of the “old” Import panels, and removing the directory tree on the right with the +(and italics) folder to be created was a major fault. Now it is a big hassle to import into the folder you like. We need a new update – and fast. People use Lightroom for work, it is not a leisure time app. 🙂

I agree completely. One of the absolutely most used features of the import was seeing the folders to be created. As I create subfolders by date, it was very helpful and easy to deselect certain date ranges that I didn’t want to import. This is especially helpful on my second machine, where I may only want to import shots from one day, but I have multiple days worth of photos on the card. That second machine doesn’t have my whole catalog, so I generally only deal with specific sessions of shots on it. Removing this feature is almost crippling to my workflow in these instances.

This doesn’t even count the ridiculous extra step that now must be taken upon first launching the import dialog, where I have to select the card rather than having it auto select upon loading.

I concur with the loss of this vital features being horrible, plus the auto eject…this was such a negative change in the interface…one of the things I had finally gotten used to was the old import interface…you can tell where things were going to go, how the folder structure would be set up, even before you did it. Why you took these things from us, without any warning is a serious concern I have, and I must admit, thought about switching to the Apple Photos program to store and catalogue my pics. Please change it back to the 6.1.1 interface and all will be forgiven, at least for me. A word of advice going forward, give your customers a way to keep the old import dialogue box, if they so choose. That way you can “experiment” all you want, but the customers won’t have to be held hostage to a lower caliber product than we are used to. Just my $0.02

While I don’t personally ever use move I valued all the easy ways to deal with photos from say a particular date by selecting or deselecting based on folders.

I am one who always turns off analytics for any and all programs and operating systems. I like my privacy and don’t want to open any doors that might make my system less secure. Call me paranoid if you want but that is the way it will stay. Use you analytics to raise question but do not treat them as answers. Talk to real people who earn real money from photography before you make decisions like dumbing down that you have. I see some things that may take a while to get used to and I may eventually like and value just as many of the things you have removed took time to learn and appreciate. Auto eject is one that I always wondered why it have to be turned on as the default setting.

If I were you Tom, I would man up and hand in my resignation letter first thing in the morning for this failure. This is very intolerable. Failure and humiliation like this is not an option in my country.

Glad I don’t live in your country. Where I live there is room try different things, to make mistakes, learn from your mistakes and do your job better in future. Tom and Adobe tried to improve Lightroom. Good on them for trying. In this case, it was a high profile mis-step. They’ll fix it then we can all move on. No need to sack anyone for trying.

Given that it is a monthly subscription there is a reason to ‘sack someone’. A monthly subscription (technically means it costs me something daily to use) had better work all the time. If it gets jacked up for a day, two days or a week there better be some refunds or credits.

If they honestly were thinking of improving the product only they could have added this new easy-screen as an option that defaults to on. But given that they explicitly instructed a coder to remove the old dialog, and held to that even after their beta testers complained about it before release, they aren’t all that innocent as you make them out to be.
This is a great example of a good product that suffers under a product management that fully grasp the entirety of its users… but thinks it does. (ooh shiny analytics!)

Removing options is never a good thing. Especially not options that work well.
If you think users can’t handle it, hide it deep in advanced settings.
Also remember, analytics can be turned off. (And don’t even think about removing that option too!)

Here’s the thing Tom, if people are paying for a product and then you remove features from said product that feels like stealing something from them. Also the “fix” did nothing for me and many others. Lightroom will not open for me at all.

Also you are building a two-class society by adding features to the subscribed version of the same product that others have still paid for. I mean, the version numbers itself should tell you something. How can a version change from 6.0 to 6.1 to 6.2 be something different than 2015.0.0 to 2015.0.1 to 2015.0.2?

You claim major new features (like the dehaze) have always been released with major releases and therefore the LR6 community will not get it, as they are stuck with their major 6.x release, but on the other hand the CC community gets it in a version, that has two minor version steps increased? This is hilarious!

Winni, I’m in the same boat but don’t agree with you. When I made the choice between a perpetual license for LR6 and going to CC it was clear from the website that with a perpetual license I would only get camera updates and bug fixes but no feature updates. Those would have to wait until LR7 (the next major release). So I think not getting dehaze is fair game. However I would have hoped we were also spared the new import feature, why we got that really beats me. I agree with Patrick that feels like stealing. Fortunately I don’t need any new camera support soon so I can safely stay on LR 6.1 until this mess is cleared and Adobe puts back the missing options.

I concur with John Ellison. There are many features that only some people use that are critical to those users. Give those features back to us, perhaps by including an “advanced button” (or some other mechanism). BTW, this feature should be a toggle that turns those features on until they are turned off. I personally import from disk, moving the images and converting them to DNG in the process. Without being able to move images while importing from disk I will have to completely change my workflow.

This is such an obvious solution to simplifying the interface and still maintaining the additional functionality that I cannot believe that Adobe did not think of this. What was your reason for rejecting this solution, particularly since you already have an “Advanced” button?

Please give us back ALL the features that you took away in the latest “downdate”.

As it is, I have to waste time uninstalling this abomination and re-installing an older version.

Me as well. Staying put with the product that works. Thank goodness I am not on the subscription model as my costs are already paid. I will not upgrade to newer versions until all removed items are restored. Time to look at the import feature of Capture One Pro – “professional features”.

I cancelled my CC subscription last year and switched from Lightroom to Capture One. Learning Capture One’s interface and converting my photos to the Capture One catalog was a non-trivial effort, but it was well worthwhile.

Prior to my cancelling CC, I had spent many frustrating hours online with Adobe’s support folks, who were not equipped to resolve the numerous problems I encountered with many of the Adobe CC software updates.

After reading the hundreds of comments related to this latest Lightroom update, I’m very glad I spent the time to convert from Lightroom to Capture One. As much as I liked the Lightroom application, I now realize that Adobe’s offerings are not the only option for serious photographers.

I also recently started using Affinity Photo as a replacement for Photoshop and am blown away at the quality and depth of the Affinity Photo software. I am so glad to no longer be an Adobe customer.

When I first heard about the creative cloud subscription model from Adobe two or three years ago I bought the last release of the creative suite that I could purchase outright, otherwise I would be forced into a monthly bill I did not want to have. I figured that by the time cs6 got long in the tooth some smart programmers would provide low cost alternatives to adobes products and thankfully I was correct. You guys at Adobe lost a customer in me when you went to the subscription model and nothing you can do will be able to win me back. Life goes on with or without the once incredible Adobe. This whole debacle over Lightroom confirms my decision. Sorry guys, but you are not the only horse in the stable any more, and your lack of caring for your loyal customers is going to cost you over and over and over in the years ahead in my humble opinion. I own a business and I care about my customers. It must be evident to them based on the high percentage of repeat customer orders I get. Read the book Purple Cow by Seth Godin to your team. Provide an excellent product or service. Take care of your customers. It really is that simple.

The update released today does indeed now run on OS X El Capitan, however the first thing I got it to do was hang on generating Smart Previews. CPU / GPU ramped up, but nothing was happening, yet LR was not frozen – I could still perform tasks within LR. Restarting LR solved this, but I worry about this taking place on my larger shoots, like a wedding. After that, I tried exporting 4 JPEGs, 3 of which failed because “The file could not be written” and “No rendered photo exists on disk.” Restarting Lightroom again solved this and allowed me to export the images without problem.

Something is still up with the new Lightroom. I am also not a fan of the new Import dialogue – why do we need to change screens several times to do the same thing one screen used to provide quite simply? The old dialogue was fine – Source on the left, Selected images in the middle, and Import preferences on the right. In what world is that difficult?

To avoid situations like this maybe set up some kind of poll and ask the users what they would like changed. From what I’ve heard everyone seems ok with the features they just want it to be more reliable and faster.

I agree with all the above comments about the import screens and process as they were in the previous version. it was very easy to understand and the eject card feature was very important. Please put it back in the next upgrade!!

This is too little too late. What will Adobe do to restore confidence in what had been a great product? This part of the note, “…we introduced instability that resulted in a significant crashing bug. The scope of that bug was unclear and we made the incorrect decision to ship with the bug …” implies that developers knew the bug was there but released the update anyhow.

Stripping out features combined with the practice of not making some features available to long time customers (dehaze) make me wonder about Adobe’s commitment to customers who want to purchase Adobe software.

I am very disappointed in the way Adobe has handled the vers 6 releases.

While its good to hear an apology from Tom, and thanks, there’s been a lot of damage done by shipping this unusable product which has resulted in a lot of my time wasted and money lost in the past five days (I’m still having to deal with it). It’s stressful. I don’t know how trust can be restored in Lightroom, let alone Adobe as a whole. Unless the company regroups and stars focusing on unbloated programs which talk to each other in a far more seamless way, I just can’t see a future for them.

The issue is partially the fault of the Lightroom team, however, it is the leadership from above, that is also responsible for guiding the team in this direction. Maybe Tom resigns, and he’s replaced, but the issue isn’t resolved unless the leadership the top decides to think through things differently.

While I thankfully did not upgrade so I haven’t looked at the “new” import screen, I wish to say that I use nearly ALL of the features available in the current (6.0 and earlier) import process. To have to manually eject my memory cards after importing images is simply not acceptable. And most certainly it couldn’t have been all that confusing for your customers. I’ve grown accustomed to having Lightroom do exactly what I want to do with my images when I import them and I do not want to take a giant step backwards. I have been a Lightroom user since version 2.0 but by no stretch of the imagination am I married to using it.
As for your allowing Lightroom to be released with a known bug (you always have bugs but until now I thought they accidentally slipped through), I feel it is absolutely NOT acceptable. This is not what I pay ADOBE for and if I can’t be certain that you have done your very best to release into production a reliable product than I must reconsider just what it is I am paying you for, and why.

All I heard in Tom’s apology regarding the import dialog is that they decided to make some changes but didn’t execute the roll-out very well. I didn’t hear that they understand why users are upset about the changes, and more importantly, I didn’t hear that they plan to bring back features that people want and need. In Tom’s responses to comments, I heard defences of the changes. Based on what I’ve read, I am not hopeful that we will see (something like) the original import dialog restored to Lightroom. I don’t understand why Adobe didn’t add a “streamlined” version of the import process for new users and others who don’t need extra features, while keeping the original “advanced” version, but maybe that would have displeased the gods of analytics.

Here here. Many Scanners have an easy mode and an advanced mode. It would make perfect sense here in the import module. Over time people who start with easy mode can explore the advanced features and learn them. Everyone wins.

How about making a version that does not take up ALL my RAM? It is ridiculous how much memory LR and PS take up on a computer. Instead of removing useful tools and features make.it RUN BETTER! Also, how about a clone/healing brush that’s a little smarter when selecting content aware fill? Or better yet, make it like the PS version where you can select the area you want to clone first? These are useful improvements, not this BS you are doing now.

I appreciate the apology but it seems a bit calculated and disingenous. This is the worst screw-up that I recall, but certainly not the first. The last several major releases of Lightroom had bugs or performance issues that were show-stoppers for many users and could/should have been caught in testing. I am tired of beta testing Adobe software post-release. Adobe has demonstrated very little in the past 2-3 years to indicate that they understand the needs/frustrations of their devoted user base or care deeply enough to change course. Every release seems to add more features at the expense of stability, performance, or usability with little regard for the voice/experience of the customer.

Well, today is the end of the line for me. I have no confidence that Adobe has a clear strategic direction for Lightroom, or that it will devote resources to fixing long-standing bugs. I cancelled my Photography Plan (early, so paid a penalty) and I am back to a perpetual license while I evaluate other options (which will most likely not include Lightroom 6.x or 7).

Thanks for your apology. It is absolutely in its place, as I have been very frustrated for the last couple of days. bBt I am not convinced you care about me as a client before the old import is back with all its functions together with a stable version of LR.. I have downgraded LR to CC2015.1.1 and I am not upgrading anymore until I am 100 % sure that you can deliver a stable version that has the old import in it.

If you still, after experiencing the massive protests from the professional LR-user community, want to keep the dumbified import, please make an option between the two import alternatives (dumbified/old import) when you import.

I have now learnt that you (the company Adobe) do not care about your customers the way you I expect you to.
Also, I would like to add that this whole mess has made me use the opportunity to look into other Raw-converters, like Capture One.

… you’ve learned late. Lightroom is obviously tip of the iceberg. I stopped even posting feature requests for other apps, like Premiere. There are treat a paying customer like we would be obligated to pay and should be happy they are willing to give us permission to use their work-of-art-apps. It reminds me on communist regime, where people ought to be grateful for privilege to be citizen.

I am not a fan of changing the Lightroom Import interface to a more simplified model. However, if a simplified Import interface is truly necessary, then at least provide a user option to revert to the “Legacy Import Interface”. I’ve been a user of Lightroom since the release of version 1.0, and I hope that my recent decision to upgrade to LR 6 doesn’t prove to be something I regret.

I appreciate the apology, but it seems it is offered only half-heartedly. The use of the term: ‘very low usage features’ reveals you may still not fully grasp the seriousness of the situation.

I mean, who informed you these were low usage features. If it was feedback from your private alpha and beta testing group, you either need to expand or diversify that pool because if the past four days or so on the feedback.photoshop.com discussion that recently moved into second place of all-time on that site is any indication … you are trying to make decisions on inaccurate and/or incomplete information.

Nearly 500 users in unprecedented fashion found the time to make their feelings known on this issue and you still choose to label it as the ‘removal of low usage features?’ …

That attitude really does make me doubt your sincerity … and I have been on this journey with you since the very first day of the very first public beta back in 2006.

I just want to caution you, if you want to earn back my trust, and by all indications I am not alone in this sentiment, you and your team really do have a Herculean task ahead of you. We won’t be fooled twice.

Well said, I appreciate the apology but he still gave a reason for such a bad move when he should have said “We were wrong, we will get LR back to where it was and make it better”.

We all make mistakes, but Adobe has been making mistakes over and over again since LR6 came out. I started with LR4, and moved up to LR5 which basically was a better version of LR4. I installed LR6 on day one, and reverted back to LR5 within a couple hours, because I could immediately tell that it was a much slower, clunky program.

I have a low tolerance for updates that take features away and don’t improve things. That is why I do not update my IOS or OS on my Mac products. The difference with Adobe is that I know that when I buy my next camera, I will NEED to use their updated products. If they keep making changes like this it leaves me no option but to find an alternative program.

I’ve been waiting since the spring to LR6 to come together, and this update has proven that that may NEVER happen. Even in this apology, there was NO reassurance that they were going to put LR back to where it was, there was no concrete plan.

So you are essentially saying “We are sorry you are mad, but…. kinda sucks for you because we decided on what’s important to your workflow”.

Lightroom was SOOOOO amazing before, that I believe there is still a sliver of goodwill left between Adobe and the photographic community, but they need to be incredibly careful in how they proceed.

While I appreciate the apology, this was not a whole hearted approach and did not alleviate my concerns.

I want to hear that you are putting LR back to how it was before, If that’s not on the table then there is no chance of your building any trust. If you are offering something less advanced than what you had, I am not interested in your products.

I need to know now, because I need to start looking into other alternatives for my post processing if Adobe shows ANY signs of not rolling back these changes and actually making LR better.

Tom, First, your recognition of the problem you, Adobe, created by releasing this disastrous update prematurely and your apology is a step in the right direction. Every time I hear the word “analytics” applied to a business model, the hairs on the back of my head stand up. Analytics provide just numbers and percentages but have no soul, no feeling. It is obvious from the overwhelming cry of the photography community that the cold numbers missed the mark by a wide margin. Something as simple as ejecting the card after import was somehow lost in the numbers and graphs and pie charts. I like Dave Dieppe’s idea of some form of beta testing with the ACE community in future updates. I am still very much in favor of the option to go either with the simple import process and to have an advanced/pro level option for importing as well by bringing back the removed functions. Tom, your admission and apology was the first course of the meal, having the options for a simple and advanced import process would be a WIN-WIN for Adobe and the icing on the cake. This would really go a long way to bringing everyone back into the Adobe fold and regain your lost trust. Thank you.

I’m not allowing CC to upgrade until the import dialog is closer to what it was last week. Especially need eject after import. I also saw discussion elsewhere that there were problems with previously installed plug-ins. I’m not sure if it was in reference to the new PS LR or both

Adobe is a business and is looking to make as much profit as it can by reaching the widest audience it can. Or, “let’s dumb things down to reach the broadest audience regardless of the needs of the people who bought and supported the product and made it successful”. While Adobe is entitled to a profit the people whose livelihood depend upon the functionality of the product are directly and significantly harmed by the pure greed exhibited by Adobe to reach “the masses”. If you want to be an “also ran”iPhoto type company, advise your customers in advance so they can make other arrangements to survive and support their business and family needs. This whole episode is tantamount to Coca Cola “reinventing” Coke. How’d that work for them? I would scrap this entire last release, got back to where things were and start over. I, for one am looking for acceptable alternates in the event Adobe doesn’t wholly fix this problem. This cannot happen quickly enough. And, some IDIOTS need to be fired.

If you really want to reignite the discussion like we had in 2006 you’re going to have to do better than your rather lame apology. You still make it sound like the problem was poor communication about why you were making the changes to the import module while 500+ users have told you you broke their workflows by removing functionality. You want to talk, how about announcing the return of the real import module while you decide what to do next. I suggest you add a mix of common sense to your “metrics”. By your logic I imagine the split tone should go in the develop module as I imagine it isn’t used much either.

Fortunately, I haven’t upgraded, and I won’t until this mess gets fixed. The apology is only a minor first step. And put the eject upon import back in. This is just crazy and reminds me of how Apple dumbed down their professional products and lost the confidence of their customers. You didn’t by chance hire some of those folks did you?

Tom-
Thanks for starting addressing the issues with the latest release. Like most other commenters, I strongly prefer the old import process, and ALL of the features you removed. As someone who works with Lightroom users to help them clean up their catalogs, the MOVE option is essential. The eject or not eject card option is essential, and being able to easily navigate through where we will import to is even more essential. Please restore the import dialog.

Thank you for responding to the feedback quickly. I wish it didn’t take a user revolt to get you guys to respond so quickly all the time.

For me, the big missing feature is the “move” option.

But more broadly, the quality of Lightroom releases have been going down for years, starting from version 4, when you added the mapping module that you could — and still can! — crash within seconds, if you know how.

Please, take my $10/month, aggregate it with some other peoples’ $10/month, and use it to pay software developers to fix bugs. There are many known but unfixed-for-years bugs in Lightroom. I’m happy with the features I have now. It’s past time to make them work 100% reliably.

I’d be fine if you spent the balance of 2015 and the entirety of 2016 doing nothing but whittling your bug backlog down.

I know, the old software model says that you need new features every 18 months, but isn’t this one of the attractions of the subscription model? The proposition is, “Here’s the product, just pay us a reasonable fee, and we will maintain and enhance it continually for as long as you keep your subscription current.” That gives you license to choose between features and maintenance; you are no longer forced to choose features.

Want another example of the kind of unresponsiveness I’m talking about? Here’s a bug I filed with you guys a month ago, complete with a *reproducible test case*, which has had zero response:

It seems that Adobe have managed to upset a whole bunch of customers that use Lightroom in a commercial and professional capacity. photoshop.com is full of negative comments about the latest import process. I have to agree with every negative comment. We have a library of 2.8 million images and use the import feature everyday. Eject after import is vital, as is move (which we use all the time), we rename every file at import and the folder tree is vital to ensure we are putting in the correct folder.

You really need to consider who your customers and bring back features that many use.

Your team of researchers, educators and customers that say the import is daunting may be right (so is using parts of Photoshop and many other products in your stable) but that does not mean they should be removed. If you made Photoshop less daunting by removing features you would lose a whole wealth of customers. Lightroom is a professional product that you bundle with Photoshop and target professional photographers. . Listen to them admit you made a major cockup and roll back and incorporate the old import options that you have removed. Otherwise it has to be bye bye Adobe

You upset a whole bunch of customers already whenever you change as little as the colour of a button. It is as if your only option for not upsetting anybody, is to not change anything … ever. But that of course upsets people who demand certain changes.

I think there is some extreme over-reaction here. Yes, the LR team made a huge mistake on this release. Mr. Hogarty has owned up to it and apologized, and now the team should be given the chance to fix it. No-one needs to resign here.

I have been a software designer for over 25yrs (not for Adobe), and I’m going to let the people who are not in the software industry in on our dirty little secret. Every piece of software gets released with known bugs. EVERY piece of software has known bugs. There are no exceptions. If a development team waited until every bug is fixed, nothing would ever get released. It’s just not possible to write a complex piece of software that is bug-free.

It is the responsibility of the designers, the software architects and the product managers to understand the impact and severity of the known bugs and to make tough decisions about which bugs are severe enough to delay a release and which can wait to be fixed in the next release. In this case, the LR team made the wrong decision on at least one of these bugs. Hold your mouse up high if you’ve never made a decision that later proved to be wrong (if you’re currently holding you mouse up, you’re lying to yourself and you look foolish).

I will concur with Mr. Hogarty that until a designer is able to reliably reproduce a bug it is EXTREMELY hard to fix it. Many times in my career I have been in the stressful position of having managers hounding me for dates to provide a fix for a bug that I don’t even know how to reproduce yet. It’s not a nice position to be in.

So I will cut the team some slack on the bugs introduced and hope that the worst of them are fixed in 6.2.1.

The bigger sin committed by the LR team IMO is to not consult and listen to the existing user base before making such sweeping changes to such an important function as the import.

Removing functionality is always a dangerous thing as you can never have a 100% view of how the software is being used. As a software designer I understand that every line of code adds to the cost of maintaining the code overall, so I know it is important to remove unused code. But I also understand, as a user of software, how frustrating it is when functionality I’ve come to rely on is taken away.

I was fortunate in that I watched Sean McCormack’s video (http://lightroom-blog.com/2015/10/05/lightroom-6-2/) comparing the old and new import windows and made the decision to not upgrade. I made that decision solely based on the removal of the eject-after-import option. I rely on that option on every single import, and I will add my name to the list of people asking for it back.

I am also disappointed with the removal of the Destination Folder filter to select which photos to import. I find “Don’t import suspected duplicates” to be unreliable, especially when I don’t always import to the same drive (sometimes I import to my internal disk, sometimes to an external). When I travel I do not erase my cards until I get home, so I will have several days worth of shooting on each card and I usually only want to import the current or previous days photos since the older photos will have been imported already. The Destination Folder filter was perfect for this.

The removal of the “Move” option is puzzling to me. While I never used it personally, it just seems like such an obvious and easily implemented option that I don’t understand why it was removed.

I can understand how new users might find the destination folder tree daunting, but it is also a function that I have come to rely on and I am disappointed that it’s gone. I think hiding it under the advanced options, which is collapsed by default, would have been a better decision to avoid scaring the newbies while still providing this important functionality to the experienced users.

This is just my (very long) 2¢ worth, but I do hope the LR team will listen to the current user base and bring back these features that we are asking for.

So you release software knowing it has errors? I know from theoretical computer science that you can’t prove for the physical absence of errors but you cat test every as Anyway, before starting photographing career I was in software development, too. We had release management and depending on it there have been several test stages. If you have new functions you depend on new use cases which flow into test cases. Several different groups tested using the test cases to make sure the software was tested as good as possible before it was released. And of course every other use cases that have been dependend on the new test cases!

Adobe knows nothing about software quality of test methods. Seems like hacking some new functions into the the system and replacing well working functions with some odd ones which slows your workflow down.

Blunt answer, yes. I have never worked on a product team that did not operate this way.

“Adobe knows nothing about software quality of test methods. Seems like hacking some new functions into the the system and replacing well working functions with some odd ones which slows your workflow down.”

You’re confusing testing and quality with usability and functionality. The dumbing down of the import function is not due to lack of testing or poor quality, it’s due to a lack of understanding their users.

I, too, am a professional software developer, with a similar span of experience. I must rebut several of your points:

> Every piece of software gets released with known bugs.

That’s a bit overstated. A lot of software is released without any *known* bugs, but has bugs anyway. Plus, there is at least one piece of production software, used every day by millions of users, which has no known bugs. (TeX).

The real question is, what happens when it comes time to release version n+1, where you now know about the bugs in version n, and are choosing whether to spend finite development resources to fix the reproducible ones or to create new features instead. Adobe’s been releasing new versions of Lightroom containing known, reproducible bugs for *years*. Now they’re telling us that their intent is not to fix them, but to lop off the feature containing the bug? And we’re not talking about rarely used features here, but ones people have built everyday business workflows on top of.

> until a designer is able to reliably reproduce a bug it is EXTREMELY hard to fix it.

True, but Lr 6.2.1 contains many reproducible bugs. I gave a link above to one that goes back to Lr 6.0, and mentioned another that goes back to Lr 4.0. There are more, but I can’t be bothered to catalog them here. Adobe surely knows about those and more already.

> not consult and listen to the existing user base before making such sweeping changes

Agreed.

After the CC change, Adobe stopped releasing public betas. I’ve been testing those betas since before 1.0 came out, and it’s always been one of the best reasons to use Lightroom: the perceived ability (though possibly a false one) to influence the direction of the product before it is released, rather than what we’re doing now, which is criticize it afterward.

> you can never have a 100% view of how the software is being used

Adobe baked telemetry into Lightroom. They knew full well they were removing features that people are using every day.

> The removal of the “Move” option is puzzling to me.

Lightroom has a tendency to nanny its users. There are many features the software should have, but doesn’t, because someone decided they could be dangerous. Observe how many Lr plugins depend on exiftool to get things done, for example, when the Lr SDK should have had these functions already, from the beginning.

Move has always been disabled when the source is a camera card, on the theory that you’ll want to erase the card in the camera, and that it acts as a backup until you have backed up your LR catalog contents.

That’s fine as far as it goes, but there are use cases where you don’t need or want that nannying. What if your photo source is an online photo sharing site, so that you can always just re-download the photos if something goes wrong on the import? Moving the photos from the download folder is exactly what you want here, to keep your download folder clean. I don’t *want* a copy of Uncle Bob’s photos sitting around in my Downloads folder after I’ve imported them.

The question of Move vs Copy should be a *user* decision, the same way it is everywhere else in the system. I’m all for sensible defaults, but removing features because someone could possibly cause a problem with it is just mollycoddling.

I have to say, I never expected from Adobe what many of us have experienced with this last upgrade… I’ve been using PS since version 4.5 and LR since its release in 2094…I can’t ever remember an upgrade that took away features I used so regularly… Yes, I want the eject card feature back and all the import options as before. This taught me one important lesson…. Normally when the creative cloud app alerted me to an upgrade I’d click the upgrade button without a thought … I got use to always getting an improvement to my workflow!
You can bet I’ll use a lot more caution next time ! This was sad and scary… Makes me wonder where your steering LR…. I don’t want Adobe to steer LR down the same road as Aperature and Finalcut Pro ……

Tom: I’m not a professional photographer but I could not agree more with all the many comments I have read on this issue. I too use every one of the functions that have been dropped in the new release. Please add my vote to call/plea to restore what to many of us is critical functionality. The suggestion of user selectable streamlined and advanced import interfaces seems most reasonable. A swift response along these lines will go a long way to retaining the loyalties of the customer base upon which Lightoom’s success has been built.

I still don’t understand how an “upgrade” removes key features that many photographers rely on in their workflow.
The import process was not broken obviously from the response you are getting on this issue. Maybe you should look at the quality of your tutorials if some individuals don’t understand the software. In fact you should reevaluate your support staff. I called about this upgrade and the person I was assigned did not know how to use the new features! Don’t remove features we have used for years or at least give us the option of keeping them.
Thanks!

The problem with analytics is that they don’t delve into the customer psyche and measure passion. Your customers aren’t passionate about the product; they’re passionate about the result! Please respect the passion and focus on making the result excellent for current as well as future customers. People and companies make mistakes. First comes recognition; seond comes an apology; third comes a fix. I hope you’re moving full speed ahead on a fix. No need to resign or fire anyone as long as you learn from the mistakes!

Kudos Tom for addressing the community so quickly and opening up the dialogue,
but as far as the numbers go (re: “In-product analytics”), I would offer another gentleman’s advice:
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
-Albert Einstein, Physicist

“overwhelming customers with every option in a single screen was not a tenable path forward.”

What I’m reading here is, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that you mean *new* customers. The current customers/users, I don’t think any of us are overwhelmed by the import dialog; most professionals have complex workflows that the many options help execute. This all would hint that perhaps Adobe is trying to create a more streamlined/amateur-friendly version of LR to increase new customer acquisition? If so, leaves me asking more questions…is LR having an identity crisis? Can Lightroom be all things to all people? Perhaps Adobe needs to make a separate Lightroom Elements version for the OTC consumer looking for a simple interface (on par with iPhotos/Photos), or somehow integrate the ability to choose your import interface (pro/simple)?

LR room is a great tool, and I hope that you’ll consider restoring the previous import interface in the next update.

Anyone read this apology carefully, could read he is NOT apologise for new import dialog, but ONLY for bug related. And they think the issue is bad communication. It’s like police in our country: There is no slight chance they made a mistake – the only possibe discussion is about way how we will pay the ticket.

Look ADOBE: If you really care (If you are not like Animoto), and want our trust back than instantly revert old import dilaog back in full. No stupid play like we listened and we are giving “move” and “eject” ferature back on top of new import dialog and say “It’s there, see, there three levels deep in the menu under settings menu, under…” STOP IT! We do not want this new import dialog. Period. We were paying for product it was. When in the working mornig of monday we opened Lightroom we were shocked. No communication would change that.

We want apples, give us apples. We do not want fancy potato, even if is golden metallic plated. We want our apple back. NOW! Any other is pure insult.

Than when you knee down we can gain trust by asking if we want change, and what we want. Than we will discuss.

And most important: I filled hundreds if not thousands feature requests and bug reposrt in last decade. Little to nothig in Adobe applications went good way in the real improvement direction. Good improvements were in era if CS1 to CS3 – later was unstable. CS4 brought some improvements (mostly real multicore support). CS5 and 5.5 was mist, CS6 is somehow latest good compromise. Than CC came and we are in toboggan slide of stupid unlogical changes toward more and more aukward and limited and constantly force user to new and new adaptation of workflow.

What you want to achieve? North Korea style, where all are like one (same haircutt, same way of living life)?

I know… you have your high time now and loosing 20% old users is like spit in the ocean, while youl gain other. Some will adapt (again), some will leave, some will come… So much you care.

I still have a sour taste in my mouth because of the lack of dehaze on the non CC version of LR. I’ve spent a lot of money on LR & upgrades over the years. I even bought LR back when it was still $300. So crap like this adds to my unhappiness with Adobe. Put the auto–eject back in, please. I used it on every import.

Please do away with the silly, giant check marks that cover up the images that are to be imported. How on earth are we supposed to be able to see which images we do and do not want to import. I will grant you that most of the time I want to import all of the images on my card, but quite frequently there are large runs of images that I don’t want to bring into Lightroom. I was very happy with checkboxes and dimmed thumbnails for the files I wanted to skip.

With a kind of monopole in the image processing market Adobe became more and more arrogant profiting of his situation to impose all and anything to the users.
It is inadmissible that users pay for features and that then Adobe removes these features without their consent.
But take care Adobe Lightroom Photoshop, times change, you are a big dinosaur, old and inerte. Take care, other software houses (Capture One, Affinity) are developing excellent products, with modern and efficient concepts, and they will be (are) “dangerous” competitors and will very soon smash your arrogance!
By the way you have lost one user for sure!

Tom – I appreciate your apology for the bugs – accepted. But regarding the UI and functionality change you don’t seem to have listend to the vast majority of the users – who don’t want this redesign and even more important need most of the features you took away in their workflow (won’t repeat them – they have been listed often enough)
I have never been a fan of User Interface redesigns but can live with them as long as I have the functionality available I need. This is however no longer the case with the new Import dialog. Frankly – if turning LR into a “one size fits all” workflow “app” is the direction that Adobe continues and maybe even turns LR into a “one size fits all” raw processor I will be forced to go and look for an alternative. I would hate to do this but would take the trouble if I cannot find a reasonable workflow in LR any more.
I’m only glad I didn’t jump on the subscription boat but bought LR6 . So I can continue to use LR6.1 for a while and if I need to move to other software I can still continue to work on my old photos with LR and don’t lose my development settings for the photos I put work into.

The import screen is now a hot pile of garbage. I hope I never have to spend another moment on the phone with your terrible support team, also. Have you fixed the catalog syncing issues with collaboration over your servers?

I much prefer spending my $10/month on Netflix, that at least works as advertised.

quite happy to read an apology, it means when you want to listen you have plenty of feedback, but at the same time it shows you listened too late. I think we are not really talking about removing unnecessary options due to some user-collected data, please – stop lying. Having a simpler “newbie approved” import experience is what you (possibly) tried to do with the new “add photos” screen, which is actually a way to introduce an alternative workflow for beginners. Touching the standard “advanced” import panel makes no sense, especially removing options from there (was really the Eject Card so complicated to code and maintain?).

My point is that truth is hidden in details: if you managed to put a huge round and opaque checkmark icon right IN THE MIDDLE of a photo thumbnail and also greying the selected photo (!!!) it just mean that the people who did that and the ones who were supposed to test and approve that had their brain switched off for some reason. Any mediocre UX expert would tell you this is insane for a photography workflow, let alone anyone who has been part of the Lightroom team – a software “designed by photographers for photographers” you said more than once – in the past greyed images were the unselected ones. Where are these people??

This brings to another point which I’d just copy/paste from another comment of mine: Do you know what I really believe happened and you’ll never admit? This is the result of the new, distorted, “agile-like” coding workflows that allow something to ship even when still in development, just because you need to ship something. Something I’ve already seen elsewhere (Photoshop design space anyone?).

You jumped on the CC wagon to be able to release new features as soon as there were developed.
You failed because you’re still driven by release deadlines, possibly even more than before.

Please ask for more user feedback in the proper place (beta program) and at the proper time (BEFORE releasing something).
thanks

The ghastly visual design of the new Import interface only adds insult to the injury—in the case of working pros, financial injury— resulting from removing features.
If Adobe wants to turn Lightroom a crummy version of iPhoto, that’s their decision. As a Lightroom user since the beginning, I’ll be enjoying 6.1.1 for the foreseeable future, after which I’ll bid Adobe “adios!”
I cannot support…or spend my time with… stupidity.

Devil’s advocate opinion: Every extra feature Adobe keep in the software is so many more iterations of testing prior to release. This adds up because it is multiplied by every configuration to support, and yes there shold be automated builds etc etc, but even that takes time and resources to configure. There is no infinite budget.
It is wise software release management to keep the number of features you support under check.
Note, I’m not saying the features Adobe removed were correct in the slightest – I liked Eject Card on Import too. But I don’t believe having two Import screens is likely nor sustainable for Adobe’s Lightroom team to support and test every release. I hope there is a middle ground.

From the beginning i worked with Aperture. But Apple recently forced me to change from Aperture to another software. Because Apple finished Aperture and published the new ultra super super duper app PHOTOS.
It is a change from professionell to consumer needs. I was between Capture One and Lightroom. I chose Lightroom. After that i moved Terabytes of images. Work of weeks!

And what happened now: Lightroom changed the import Dialog from professional to consumer! And i think we see only the starting point of this way. Don ́t use Apple as a role model anymore, please. it will be the worse scenario for professionell photographers.

And the “funniest” thing is (as a LR 6 user), that I don´t get the dehaze function but instead i ve got the new import dialog…

They have you hooked on their subscription service (which I would now label “pay more for less”) so now they arrogantly remove features that are important for professionals in order to boost sales for non-professionals. Not a very intelligent move, considering that it is the professionals that teach and write about their products – the result is an enormous loss of trust and goodwill in the community. If they wish to create a Lightroom Light for beginners, why don’t they just go ahead and offer that at a reduced price? Instead of removing useful professional features that we paid for? I am not updating anywhere soon – the removal of the auto-eject feature alone is reason enough for that.

You made the “incorrect decision to ship with the bug” and you believe an apology is enough correction?
Sorry. How about your resignation? Now that would be meaningful.
As to the removal of “very low usage features”, exactly how did this improve the quality? And how stupid are your “…educators and research team…” to think that “The import experience in Lightroom is daunting”?
Granted, it’s not the iPhone, but Lightroom is NOT supposed to be for the damn iPhone. It’s for working pros, semi-pros, and advanced amateurs who love digital photography—not the selfie crowd.
Now matter how much one tries, you cannot “communicate[d] properly or openly before launch” a bad decision. A rapist explaining the act to his victim beforehand does not make the act correct. And from the tone of over 500 responses, I think many of us feel violated.
You violated our trust. You violated our peace of mind and in many cases, our livelihood.
You want our trust back?
Fine. Immediately issue a new release that restores the Import dialogue exactly as it was before this unmitigated disaster. Then you can start a brand new dialogue in order to restore the “original core values of the product and the team.”
To do anything else is, as another commentator wrote, pure corporate BS.

Hi Tom,
this is a first step. I wonder how you measure how many people used the destination folder preview, as it is always there and was essential. I often used the checkboxes there to import just a certain day. This is impossible now.
The date formats are not intuitve and that would have been a field of imporvement. So I need the destination folder preview to see whats happening. What about the possibility to customize the date formats. Maybe I just want do have month – day etc.

Some things can be done differently (better) in a new import dialogue.
A wish would be to have the Filter (Metadata) from the library module also in the import. There I could easily filter and select what days, what camera etc I´d like to import. The selection could then reflect the selection. This would be even more logic than the checkboxes in the destination folder preview. However the preview is still needed.

What ever you do do it in dialogue with your customers and do it fast, as these “unimportant” removed features destroyed the workflow of so man of us.

My reply to your comment is a month late, but still honest. The only reason I subscribed to Adobe’s CC was to try Lightroom CC and PS CC on my Surface Pro 3. Not impressed enough to continue the subscription after my year is done.

As a long-time Corel user, I’d heartily agree with opting to use Corel Draw’s Graphics Suite. Unfortunately, they, too, have implemented the subscription model to be able to use certain features. The good thing is that basic functionality is available in the traditional upgrade version. Either way, you’ll pay.

Unfortunately Lr is used also by the pros, i don’t care if grandma at her house can’t import photos if that means i have to change my workflow.
On larger analysis i think you guys @Adobe need to be respectful to the pro community, and this update is just lame, if that’s an indication on how you’re going towards a more amateurish user base i think i might unsubscribe and start looking elsewhere for a better DAM solution, C1 is already by far a better conversion software by the way.

David, have you performed a preference file reset? Close Lightroom, hold down [Alt/Opt]+[Shift] and relaunch Lightroom. Discard/Overwrite the preferences when prompted. After doing so is your import speed affected?

Never used this Import window, but Synchronize Folder now seems to work again. Thank you.

As for removing features – don’t do that. What I have learned after decades in software development is that some customers might drag you to court over such details.
So we never remove anything, even though it might be meaningless or plain stupid functionality – there is always someone somewhere that is still using it.

Sorry, I was overenthusiastic when reporting the Synchronize bug as fixed yesterday.
The Synchronizze dialogue reports the number of photos correctly, but it then fails to synchronize any sub folders. It only includes photos in the current directory.

Aand the Photo Merge/Panorama function is broken. It fails to merge for the most part, sometimes producing something weird looking in the “Perspective” mode.
Luckily I still have Photoshop for such thing.

Most of the things have already been said. But what makes me afraid, is not the fact that some major bugs ruined the 6.2 / 2015.2 versions, but the whole mind set which led to this catastrophy. As another reader stated, you are became fat and arrogant. This was already illustrated, at large, how you treat LR 6 users as second class citizens (I’m a CC subscriber). Please take action – meaning rethinking through the whole philosophy – and I’m afraid that it will take you a couple of white nights …..

So you’re seriously equating low usage of a feature with low importance of said feature to the individual user and then believe it’s a good idea to simply remove this feature that was present in your product for many years? Seriously?

In my job I regularly have to import individual photos from 15 or more cards in succession. The “eject after import” feature is essential TO ME PERSONALLY and I don’t care if anybody else uses it. You’re making my work significantly harder with this decision and it’s a major mystery to me how this could have slipped through regression testing.

Hide features behind a settings screen if you (falsely) believe that they are not important to your users.

DO NOT STEAL LONG AVAILABLE FEATURES AWAY FRIM THOSE WHO BUILT THEIR WORKFLOWS ON THEM.

Change can be difficult and some just don’t like change… It’s rare that I’ve seen good functionality removed from software, and the makers have considered it an improvement.

Cleaning up the Import dialog is a great move, but if we could either have the option to switch back to the old version, or have more ‘advanced’ settings you could set which did the same things as old, some of the loyal supporters wouldn’t be up in arms…

If your data showed that removing these essential features would not impact our workflows, then you are at fault for not ensuring that you are measuring the right data. Ask people to opt-in on the feedback and have them self-rate their LR experience level and Photography experience level.. Maybe then you’ll get useful metrics rather than metrics for metrics sake. Don’t go the high-handed MS route of deciding what’s best for the users.

I don’t thank you for the supposed apology. Simple fact is the LR team has lost contact with its User Base.
Those that have a problem with the original import dialog window don’t know how to use a computer, have never filed anything in either a filing cabinet or on a computer hard drive, have no real need to use a program like LR or PS and should stick to Apple’s Photo app or Googles Picasa or whatever they call it now.

You Tom have ruined and otherwise great program. I agree with all of the above replies especially the one saying you should resign (maybe you can find a job with Apple. They just love to make all the decisions for their users) and the whole TEAM that thought up this new import dialog should be FIRED.

I personally will be canceling my Photographers subscription plan if the old import dialog is not reinstated ASAP. Without it the program is useless for me so there is no need to keep paying Adobe for something I can use.

This has Aperture to photos wrote all over it.
Heres a quote from Tom on macrumers.
“We’re seeing alot of people come in first on Lightroom mobile, so now we’re allowing people to use it locally on their local assets, their local photos and videos on their phone and tablet for as long as they like.

More and more people are adopting the phone as their primary camera, taking the DSLR out less and less, and we’re seeing the same thing with the use of Lightroom. Some users are creative pros who are aiming for efficiency, but many others are just consumers who love photography.”

Seen as Lightroom import is “no longer fit for purpose” i hope i can get out of my subscription under the sales of goods act uk.

Don’t know where to begin… there are so many people already expressing the same views as mine.

Let me be constructive then: please bring the normal import features back. Hide them behind a UI if you need to to be enabled by those who understand what they are doing. Show the noob mode if you need to as default to be switched off by those who like, need and appreciate the functionality offered by the normal import UI you have removed.

Really find the new import experience immature and half baked and as a paying customer it is frustrating to be forced to move from a feature rich process to a dumbed down one.

Analytics ? They’re very hard to do correctly, but most of all they’re useless.
If ford did analytics, he would have created a faster horse.
Designers THINK, they have vision, courage, they stand by it. They’re not cowardly covering their asses by lame analytics.
They also have respect for their heritage, you’re here because of the 2006 14 months feedback and talented developper of back then. And you, armed with you incorrect analytics to back you unsure, untalented, ass, you thru that heritage of the giants you’re sat on, to the trash, thinking that your stupid numbers are better than you’re predecessors talent ! That’s arrogance.

I’m pretty sure that the use of the eject feature, in the vast number of people that use Lightroom 12 times a year is very low, but I’m pretty sure it’s very high in those who use LR every day !

I am by no means a professional photographer, but I will echo the others here: What was wrong with the old import dialog? I could of other areas of Lightroom that are far more intimidating than the import dialog, which I always considered very simple and logical. Choose your source on the left, select pictures in the middle, and change where the pictures go on the right. What could be simpler?
The new import dialog doesn’t look like it is a part of Lightroom at all. It looks like it comes from a completely different application. Why split it up in two screens? This just makes it harder to use.
You don’t make changes like that in a point release. You do it in a full release with the appropriate beta testing, so that you can get feedback.
And please don’t go the Apple route and start dumbing down Lightroom. That’s not to say you shouldn’t make UI changes – I’m all for changes that improve things. But NEVER take features away!
If your apology is sincere, you will reintroduce the old import dialog ASAP and than work out what changes to make in LR7 based on actual user feedback.

Your are not making Beta anymore. So if you don’t increase the test scenarios of your test factory or what have just happen will happen again.

If you don’t want to make beta anymore you should increase the number of people that have the version in advance. Today people that write books on Lightroom have the new version in advance. But those people follow the rules when they test.or use lightroom. You should include in your limited list of people that can use in advance a version more beginners.

I am so sorry to say this: The quality of the Lightroom 6.2 is not good.
I tried everything this morning and it kept crashing with each import. (removed it and re-installed also)
Please return the old import window and listen to your customers.
I am back using 6.1. It has everything I really need for my workflow and is stable.

I hope this lesson is learned. Change is good, but don’t take away the tools we all use on a daily base.
My database is growing every day. I started to built up a new one with Lr6 and I am so happy with it. I need to see the drives, the folders, subfolders and the complete list of keywords. Guessing is not an option.

Thanks for the apology. But I am afraid, it won’t help. Coming reluctantly from Aperture to a company that tries to force down a subscription model down my throat, it seems I made the wrong decision to go with LR. No feature updates for a release that I paid for, but now you are dumbing down the software and take features away.
Please rethink these bad practices.

You have “in-product analytics that measures feature usage”? Great, then that must have told you, that for example the file names where displayed EVERY SINGLE TIME ANYBODY EXPORTED ANYTHING EVER.
As well as other features that you stripped off. So, I wonder, how did you come to the conclusion that this was a feature that is not used much? Or do you also have “in-product eye tracking that measures what the users look at”?

I don’t understand how you could justify changing the import dialog to make things simpler when the entire program is rather complicated and daunting. Lightroom is not, and was never, meant for consumers or casual users. Photoshop has Elements to appeal to those who just want to do casual retouching, and if you want to expand Lightroom’s audience then perhaps you could use that as a similar model. Taking features away, no matter how little you think they are used, is not a good path forward when it comes to improving your product.

I’m still on LR5 and have no plans to upgrade or move to CC precisely because of issues like this. It seems as though Adobe does not put the interests of their users first, and as such I don’t want to pay more money for upgrades that will remove features I use. If you think it’s a good idea to simplify the Import dialog and remove features like Eject After Import, what’s next? Dumbing down the Develop module to just one simple panel on the right-hand side? Removing Star Ratings or Color Ratings because they’re under-utilized? Ditching the Snapshots feature because your analytics indicate few people use it? If the poorly-handled 6.2 upgrade is any indication of where Adobe is going in the coming months and years of Lightroom development, I’ll keep my old version and start saving for Capture One or another program in the meantime.

Well I’m delighted that because of my unresolved problem with CC updates (unable to update the applications and getting error update failed U44M1I210) despite two long online sessions with adobe, I was not able to upgrade to the latest LR fiasco. Adobe has still NOT addressed this problem so I’ll just stick with my older but functional versions.

Tom, could the U44M1I210 problem please get fixed as well or will I wait even longer now that LR6.2 is a dud?

Hi Tom –
Thank you very much for showing there are human behind the product. And since we are all human besides your Big Data machine reading stats, I understand that you sell because you work at Adobe. I can care less about Lr import workflow. Everybody has a different workflow. Sticking only with Lr, that’s everybody’s decision.

I only the import to get images referenced into a catalog. I may not even need the preview option (I can always let that run later in the background).

Power importing is mastered by PHOTO MECHANIC > triage > drag image you want in the catalog for post processing drag over the Lr icon, that’s it. Later for browsing I can use Bridge or Photo Mechanic. I don’t browse in Lr, I pick what to edit.

So, a tiered import option panel would be great. And please do not forget to add the option: Just import – Do nothing, just get me in there. When I import, I know what I am importing already!

“Our customers, educators and research team have been clear on this topic: The import experience in Lightroom is daunting.”

All it takes is a little work and the import process is easy to use. Somehow I’ve managed to survive the process since the late beta releases.

” It’s a step that every customer must successfully take in order to use the product and overwhelming customers with every option in a single screen was not a tenable path forward. We made decisions on sensible defaults and placed many of the controls behind a settings panel.”

Fine. The problem is that Adobe REMOVED the options. Sensible defaults? Really?

“At the same time we removed some of our very low usage features to further reduce complexity and improve quality.”

Your usage information cannot possibly have come from any prudent user.
The full destination path cannot be displayed.
The renaming template is not visible during the import process.
The filename only appears when the pointer hovers over the image.
The images to be imported are dimmed.
There is a monstrous check mark over images to be imported.
What makes you think we want to see someone else’s image used as a background?

All in all there were a lot of bonehead decisions made which screwed up the import process that has worked just fine.

What Robert said:
“The full destination path cannot be displayed.
The renaming template is not visible during the import process.
The filename only appears when the pointer hovers over the image.”
(Hiding things does not make them simpler, it just makes me hunt for them).
The images to be imported are dimmed.
There is a monstrous check mark over images to be imported. (I’d add the checkmark is ambiguous. Does it mean the photo has already been imported? Or import this photo? You have to hover over an already imported photo to see “already imported”)
What makes you think we want to see someone else’s image used as a background? (Yes!)

I don’t mean to kick a man when he’s down, but this new import dialog is a big letdown to me. Navigating between its different “parts” is completely counter-intuitive (the tree on the left made so much more sense), and I do not get the point of this random selection of folders on the first screen (the one with the scenery). And I also used the “Eject after import” function.

Adobe management is no longer focusing on their customers, but some business model that makes no sense. I would fire all Lightroom managers for allowing an untested product to be released. And senior management should explain to the Board of Directiors how this product was allowed to go public without a formal Beta cycle.

I too am disappointed with the changes in the Import dialogue. Simple things like ejecting a card after import saved steps in my workflow and made importing multiple cards much slower. I also see no need for the changes that were made. The do not add to the functionality but detract from the overall product.

What is Adobe’s plan to restore the confidence of the photographic community? We each develop and optimize our own workflow and changes like this cost time and money.

I can only assume the latest Lightroom was driven by a corporate decision to sell to the technically inept, e.g. the masses, the smart phone selfie brigade. Lightroom has always been a program aimed at professionals who are technically savvy enough to figure out how it works, either by some of the excellent tutorials available (Laura Shoe) or by employing an assistant who is tech savvy.

To dumb the import down at the expense of screwing up the stability is unacceptable and a betrayal to the professionals who have supported you since LR 1. I personally have bought every new version and upgrade and now subscribe to Adobe CC. Producing a program that constantly crashes is not what professionals want or expect.

I have just installed your 6.2.2 fix and tried the first instance that I know produced a crash (LR not responding) . Namely just opening the program and then closing it. That simple request still produces the spinning ball and LR can only be closed by using ‘Force Quit’ on my Mac with the message ‘LR is not responding’.

I don’t know who you employed to create this update – maybe it was the sort of people you are aiming to sell to as new LR users, in other words the technically inept.

This is still no where good enough, especially when you consider that removing the automatic bug report is also a fix. It may fix your inbox overload but it sure as hell won’t fix the program. Get some seniors on this and stop messing with ‘newbie’ programmers who think they know it all.

Tom
We appreciate the apology. How are we moving forward? Please now make some decisions and communicate them openly to the Lightroom community ASAP.
1. Are you going to replace the missing features?
2. Which features?
3. When?

I need to know so I can change my workflow and re-write my LR training curriculum and cancel one of my classes on file management. I’m waiting to upgrade but I doubt my students are so I’m in a pickle.

After a days’ effort of attempting to use Lightroom 6.2.1 (patched), I’ve discovered that the patch does not work. Lightroom still crashes…now it simply waits until you’re performing a backup of the catalog before it trashes itself.

Brilliant!

I am moving back to 6.1.1 until Adobe gets its act together and Warnock & company decide to stop screwing their customers.

An apology doesn’t help experienced users that make up the base of your subscribers. I updated not knowing about the change to import and I wish I could downgrade back to 6.1 I was hoping for an update to fix the GPU processing issues I’ve had that and the overall slowness and slug response lightroom has had since you’ve upped it to CC, but instead we get this crap. I have over 200k pictures in my catalog, the new import screen hampers my ability to tag and catalog according to my workflow and even deleted my damn import preset settings I needed. It’s been slow since LR5, but I’ve survived. Fix the memory and performance issues, put back in an advanced import feature for your experienced users that have been subscribing since day one that need it. And focus on what matters. Photo Mechanic is starting to look more and more popular.

Quote: ” At the same time we removed some of our very low usage features to further reduce complexity and improve quality”
Let’s see the actual data that you used to qualify a feature as “low usage”. I have been using LR since Version 1.0. The import process was simple and worked every time. Why did you ruin it?
Robert

I can’t imagine why someone would not want to eject a card after importing files from the card. Ejecting should be the default. Users who don’t want to eject the card should be able to change the default to match their preference..

your apology is a step in the right direction. But I think you can feel the amount of frustration accumulated by your users in the last months, not only after this catastrophic release.
The last releases have missed what your users are waiting for and the 6.2 release was the icing on the cake of non-sense.
All the pro-photographers that I know just want SPEED.
– We do not want you to make nice images appear on the back of the import dialog while removing half of the features it had.
– We do not want you to nice checkmarks on the import images
– We do not even want you to add an HDR option.

We want the Develop module to be instantly available at full resolution.
Why do we still have to wait 6 to 7 seconds on a 4K $ MacPro after pressing Q, A searching for sensor spots.
We want to be able to import quickly. Why do we have to wait about 15 seconds (!!!) on a 4K $ MacPro to import a Fuji Raw file ???

Advanced amateur here.
Sure, the import screen was daunting in the beginning…but then I read a book and watched some tutorials.
Please don’t treat all of us like idiots. This software is made for people that take photography seriously, and I have no problem putting in the extra time to learn it over a lack of options for the new digital shooters.

Bottom line this is a trust issue: when I subscribed to CC I was told I would get frequent updates with added features. What I got instead with this update was a dumbed-down product with essential features (at least to me) removed and bugs added. That appears to be indicative of a new mis-guided philosophy around Lightroom, that will eventually drive me away from a product I have truly loved. And then, on top of that, what utter disdain for your loyal customers to rush out a point release with known bugs. I am both angry and sad.

I’ve taught Lightroom to THOUSANDS of photographers over the last several years. Improve Photography is one of the largest photo blogs on the web, so I think I have a pretty good pulse on how photographers feel about this, AND what they struggle with in the import process.

My students do NOT struggle to understand WHERE the photos are being imported from. The panel on the left on the previous import is really quite simple. We read left-to-right, so the left panel showing sources for the import was simple.

The part my students DID struggle with–for years–is understanding WHERE on their computer the photos are being imported TO. I had to explain to them that it was in the right panel, but they still never quite grasped the destination.

In the new design, the SOURCE is now it’s own page, which is useless. The thousands of people I’ve taught Lightroom to never struggled with that. The part they did struggle with, the DESTINATION, is now hidden behind a gear wheel and the drop down is even more confusing than before.

This squares exactly with my experience. I teach Lightroom classes too and the import panel was only confusing because of the destination field. The rest was never a problem. Adobe fixed the part of it that was not confusing (the source) and made the problem actually worse while removing ESSENTIAL features that we depend upon. An unmitigated disaster.

As an Aperture Refugee, I’m concerned about the path Adobe is taking. Apple abandoned a program for advanced users in favor of “Photos”. “Photos” is a greatly simplified version lacking many editing features that worked just fine in Aperture. Fine, I’m not the target audience for that, I’ll switch to Lightroom. Then we get this new import dialog box, that is prettier, but takes away some features, hides others, and is more difficult for me to use. Again, I’m not the target audience for that, but I’ve got no where else to go! I’d ask you to please reconsider turning Lightroom into the Adobe version of “Photos” and keep it working for us hobbyists, enthusiasts and professionals rather than going for the camera phone crowd. I doubt that they’re going to pay for a subscription to CC. “Photos” is free after all.

This is symptomatic of most software developers, they think that we want the new whiz band software engineering features that they want to install. Remember the old adage “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. Looking around for an alternative to LR that will care about the users.

Rarely used? Ridiculous. I have a set of wrenches. I ‘rarely’ use 80% of them. Just because I don’t use most of the sizes on a daily basis doesn’t mean I want Snap-On to come to my house and remove my tools. They are TOOLS, I like having them when and if I need them.
If you really feel a marketing need for this watered down import, let us turn it on or off and use what we are paying for. I believe PSE has optional interfaces. You rush out a horrible update that kills features and on top of that it does not work for so many. The followup fix doesn’t work either. I’m wondering what is really going on here.
For now I am back to 6.1. I will stay there until this is straightened out.

Unfortunately a post apocalypse apology doesn’t undo damage done. Since version 6.2 was knowingly released with bugs (“we made the incorrect decision to ship with the bug while…”), it is clear that profit is more important than service to Adobe. Now that I have 6.2(.1) off my computers, i will look at Lightroom and others for what I will need in the future.
The changed Import routine lacks things I used in every Lightroom version (1,2,3,4,5,6.1). I have to go through the Preferences to switch off features I don’t need that didn’t exist in earlier versions (new features?-no, that is not allowed outside of CC). The lens profiles still don’t have some older lenses I have used for years. Lots of bugs still exist and thrive in 6.2.1 and El Capitan. I haven’t even tried 6.2.1 in Windows 10. I am still shutting off features that Microsoft uses for its marketing. No measurable metrics there…
Lightroom 6.1 will suffice for a while. But if the new Import dialogue is the way of the future it is time I look for an alternate program.

The key to good UI design is not to remove features. That just ensures that you are only selling your product to the lowest denominator. I doubt that Adobe see themselves as selling to that market. Even if they did, isn’t that what Photoshop Elements is for? Lightroom is supposed to be a professional-grade product. Dumbing down for “simplicity” in a professional-grade product is absolutely not acceptable.

Good UI design is about making a feature rich set of functionality presented in a manner that is intuitive and quick to use. Unfortunately, this is a point that Adobe do continually appear to struggle with as that description couldn’t be used for many, if any, of their products.

Removing functionality in a point release is also not acceptable. I’d even question whether it was legal. We’ve bought version X of the product based on an advertised set of features. We don’t buy version X.Y, although we need to be able to update to version X.Y to ensure that we get bug fixes and, in particular, any required security updates. If you want to make big changes like this, make them in Lightroom 7 so that we can all decide if that is a product that we want to purchase. And, when you do remove features, you need to be much more honest about it in advance. Discovering that a feature has been removed only once you’ve upgraded, as was the case with auto-eject for me, does not a happy customer make.

As for the removal of the auto-eject feature, I am genuinely shocked that you saw this as candidate for removal. Any professional photographer I know wants that card ejected as soon as the import is complete because they will never re-format that card until it is next needed so that they have an extra level of back-up should anything go wrong. And it’s not as if there is a use case where a card will not be ejected…

Interesting point, we all paid for a feature that is heavily used by professionals utilizing a professional product. When Adobe forcefully removes features from a paid for product, I wonder if they have not committed fraud?

My two cents about auto-eject: I rename files as I import, and in a shoot there may be several different groups of photos that I want to give different names to. This means that I typically do several imports rather than the whole card at once, which would make auto-eject pretty inconvenient to have turned on. Judging from the other comments, however, most people don’t work this way so I’m in a minority on the issue.

I am yet to try lightroom and I would be a complete new user. I made a comment somewhere that my biggest concern was being controlled by a program. I have been watching and listening for a couple of yrs and use bridge. I am so glad I have not entered into this program. For now I will keep doing as I have been doing as things are straight forward and work with no issues at all. I prefer to take longer and to feel safer.Speed is ruining so many things these days. It’s such a shame as we live in times where too many things get changed too rapidly and often stupidly it’s no wonder people who rely on this program for their work are up in arms, I would be ropable. I think companies forget who made them successful and it’s their customers. I think a lot of damage has been done and the result will be people jumping ship as soon as something suitable comes along. I will now wait and watch. This has made me nervous and people never forget.

What Adobe’s testing of newbies missed was that the ‘concept of importing’ is a big stumbling block and not just the import dialogue.
Also there’s this foolish assumption that EVERYONE regardless of ability/expereince should be able to quickly understand software without any instruction. Sometimes the best way of doing something may need an introduction/explanation, because the better method is different from a previous way that people are used to.
What strikes me most of all is that LR would never even have got off the ground in the first place if the current mindset had been in place all those years back because LR’s way of working was radically different.

If you are going to be dumbing down Lightroom – and the import dialogue released earlier this week is a classic example, then consider a separate product – Lightroom Lite – for the touchscreen crowd.

The original panel was full of useful information – and if your feedback is that folks are bewildered by this, then BUY the KelbyOne vid on using the import dialog and offer it as a freebie to the daunted. Scott does a great job of explaining the intricacies of the Import panel.

Hiding stuff we use everyday behind an advanced panel is a retrograde step.

Besides if the design of the Import panel is the sign of things to come for the other panels then I have one word for you to consider “Metro”.

That having been said, I am really happy with Adobe’s LR and PS package (as they were a week ago) – keep up the good work, but take this feedback seriously.

There is a difference between cleaning up an interface and dumbing it down. You have apparently succeeded at the later by sacrificing features used by many of your advanced users. As a long-time Lightroom user, I have had no problems with the import dialog. All powerful software has a learning curve and Lightroom is no different, so please don’t remove features that we use to just make it simpler for new users.

I’m still experiencing various significant issues even after this update which are making lightroom close to unusable. For example I launchany of the tools (brush, crop, retouch etc.) and their corresponding panels fail to load. The adjustment panels in general fail to intermittently load. The app has become slow and glitchy.
This is unacceptable from adobe, where so many rely on the software for their business.

Oh boy! Have two additional errors with import dialog:
1. I use an import preset. It uses automatic develop, clarity, sharpening etc. Since 6.2 the automatic development preset does not work anymore. All other settings are applied. (I need the automatic value for 2nd sculling after doing a pre sculling in PM before setting my devel values)

2. I use the automatic import from a certain directory when using Photo Mechanic. I set the metadata in PM. When LR imported the images it deletes parts of the metadata (descriptions etc.). To be honest it has been since Rel. 6. When importing directly out of the PM directory everything is OK, so the PM setting of metadata is correct.

Do you have a site where you are collecting feedback about wanted features for possible re-inclusion into the experience?

For me, I’d like more emphasis on the right pane – That’s where all of the work is done. Features I’d like re-added:

+ The ability to Move as well as copy/add
+ Displaying the resulting new filename when rename photos (I use multiple templates and the visual reminder of what the new filename will be is extremely helpful)

I imagine you are getting squeezed from above, and I’m sorry, Tom. You’ve done a fantastic job with Lightroom all along up to now.

I’ve reverted to the previous version (I did that quickly, as even on Yosemite it was glacial and crashy), and I will stay here indefinitely and be very careful about clicking the update button.

The main thing for me is that I was a hard-won subscriber to the CC model as a photoshop user since the mid 90s and a LR user since the first beta became available. I was very upset about CC, but eventually I subscribed. In the past I always paid for the updates anyway, CS and pre CS, though the not-photoshop, not-lightroom Adobe apps got updated less frequently. Now though, the model seems unpalatable once again. If I keep Lightroom un-updated because the updates are actually getting worse, I still have to keep paying for the updates and paying for the app perpetually, though I’ve got the old version. In the past it felt like, “Oh, they made it worse but I still own the good version and I’m not going to pay for this one, won’t update.” Now that situation is worse for us.

As for the new version, it seems most of the focus went into Mobile and cloud features. I take photo editing very seriously, in fact doing most of that in Photoshop instead of Lightroom anyway. I want a real computer, with a real file system, and access to the files in a big external storage for editing. Lightroom for me is the best DAM for photography. I wouldn’t mind that moving to mobile — access to the whole catalog for browsing, keywording, rating. But instead it seems most of the focus on Mobile has gone into its weakest area — editing. As a photographer, I don’t get that at all. Personally I’d like it if LR kept focusing on what real photographers want and use. Make something else for the cell phone gang.

It’s funny about the features that were removed. I think in some ways you were right about the import process being confusing, because the way I do it and the way I teach it is to do a very clunky-but-solid workaround. I manually copy the files to the folder where I know I want them, and then I drag those onto lightroom from the Mac Finder. But in reading the complaints about what was taken away, I wish I had used those features. I started this workaround during the first LR beta, way back, and I’ve been stuck in my ways ever since. When you remove features so they don’t confuse beginners, then they are not there as the beginners become ready for them. A shame to do.

Very disappointing! I have a library of close to 300k images – mostly sports photography. The revamp of the import process is a complete disaster. It is not uncommon for me to have several cards to process after a weekend. The old import process/workflow easily allowed me to manipulate the directory, standard adjustments and allowing for the auto eject future. Auto eject is critical when managing the import process and being able to quickly swap cards out – additionally, to comments made previously, you shouldn’t format in the computer, camera manufacturers highly recommend formatting in the camera. Removing auto eject introduces several additional steps before removing the card and increases the chance that you’ll corrupt the images and/or file structure on the card. Quite simply, you’ve screwed up and made my workflow more difficult. Fix it – if you need to create a dummy mode for the noob, that’s fine, but don’t punish those of us using the product to manage a professional workflow.

Please. I appreciate your ‘mea culpa’, but I get the clear picture that you’re sorry for the way you rolled out the changes on the import dialogue, not for making them, which pretty much negates your ‘mea culpa’ in my eyes. I have rolled back to 6.1.1 and will stay there until the import dialogue for experienced users is restored, (or at least an ‘option for’ is put in place).

I think if I were Adobe I would be concerned at the level of anger and concern being expressed over this. I’m sure other developers are scenting blood in the water, and more power to them if Adobe doesn’t rectify this.

I can’t beleive Adobe would take features out! Seriously? Lightroom is my database for my business. Make a LR Lite if you want to make thinks easier for the newbies, but don’t remove features from a professional’s software. If you continue this, you will lose the rest of the pros who are not using Capture One.

I can’t believe you would remove professional features! If you want to lose the rest of the professional field to Capture One then continue this way. Make a LR Lite if you want to court newbies or have a dumb down switch.

If I read the apology correctly it’s only for:
– releasing a buggy update
– not communicating the import dialog change
However it seems that you still think the import dialog change is good and in the right direction. Well let me be clear on this topic (together with many other frustrated users on many fora): taking useful options away is stealing from your customers. You promised what was getting when I bought a perpetual license to LR 6: camera updates, bug fixes and support for new cameras. Nowhere was there any warning you would take options away, only a warning I wouldn’t get functional updates like CC users. So I really feel betrayed and that’s not something you should do to a customer and in my mind requires a more clear apology than the one given (as well as a fix).

I think all has been said. The import dialog never was a problem to me, though I am a mere amateur. Wasn’t expecting a new one. An improved face recognition would have helped me more… but that’s off topic.
Maybe Adobe needs to provide optional import dialogues, like as an Lightroom “Essential” mode for beginners?
I’ll wait a while now and see how the world looks after the storm settled. I am a Lightroom user since the pre-Adobe times, would miss it. But everything has its time.
Henkki

Tom:
I realize that expanding the user base is the only way forward for a public company with shareholders/ROI pressures. But don’t cross the line to over-simplification where, to paraphrase Thomas Mann, you become the enemy of the state. LR is a wonderful program BECAUSE it is feature rich. Among my beginner students, each finds a workflow that’s777777777777777777 (sorry, cat on keyboard) suitable to their mindflow. None of them has ever complained about the Import dialog. I suspect there’s an Elements faction holding sway at Adobe; banish them before you lose your core users.

The great strength of Lightroom is (was??) its flexibility. Many different workflows could be accommodated because of all the choices.
Workflow starts with importing. Removing choices from the Import dialog hamstrings Lightroom’s greatest strength.
Please consider giving us the choice of our own workflow, and return those features that were removed.

This reminds me of Microsoft Vista. When companies like Adobe get too big and powerful they start to “tell” us what we want, or catering to a new clientele they don’t have yet. Good old marketing. Maybe time to look at other post processing software.

I am so glad I didn’t get this update. I am another person who automatically ejects card after import, I also don’t send usage data to Adobe (or any other software manufacturer.)

Lightroom is an advanced tool and used by advanced users who have the ability to use the advanced features. Improve and sell Elements Organizer to those who don’t need or cannot use Lightroom’s advanced features, don’t take those features away from those of us who paid for them. (Here’s an idea, why not offer the full version of ACR as an option for buying Elements.) You have dumbed down Elements so much over recent years that I have stopped buying it, don’t do it to Lightroom.

Also, dehaze update should have been included in Lightroom 6 as well as CC. I won’t rent my software license, I will only ever buy it outright. If you force those hand of those of us who don’t want to rent, then we will go elsewhere. There are other, better dehaze tools on the market as there are other, better panorama and HDR tools. Adobe’s raw converter isn’t the only one available either.

Continue treating loyal customers with contempt then we will move onto using one of the up-and-coming rivals who respect photographers and our needs.

Not the first time features have been taken away. Used to be able to create a slideshow that advanced every one-tenth of a second. That’s been gone since LR4, never to be seen again. Now the fastest you can advance is once a second. Not exactly a time-lapse tool.

That’s a nice apology, but the proof will be in the return of functionality to those of us who have been using Lightroom for years – version 1 for me. A return of the eject-card-after-import function is important to many people. I would like to see a Preferences-centric choice to use a “classic” import function with the interface we’re accustomed to seeing or the “new and really not improved” import function just introduced. The classic form really isn’t rocket science – work from left to right and from top to bottom. Pardon me, but DUH!

I got a heads-up about potential problems with this update, so I have not yet installed it. I shall wait until (hopefully) some form of common sense returns.

I seem to have found another “bug” and that is when I push the “F” key on my keyboard, to take everything else away besides the picture, my computer hangs. The only difference I did from my normal process routine was to use the dehaze feature in the effects panel. I am working on a Windows 10 computer. Am I the only one experiencing this problem?

maybe it’s time for a “Lightroom elements” version with all the dumbed down features. I like the import box the way it was and I will not be downgrading to the newer version.
Until this point my only lr complaint was that the catalogue can’t be on the network server. With 30 students at a time, all of which are noobies, having lr open a catalogue on the network volume would be great.

Please return to “old” import panel! The “new” import panel borders on being insulting to former LR users. I am sorry to see Adobe going the route that so much of our culture has taken: “design for the lowest common denominator of user and forget about the rest.” The “old” import was not complicated, but one had to use a little of one’s brain in navigating it, but I can see how “the lowest common denominator” user would have gotten befuddled.

I have used LR since v 4, now on 5, and used pretty much all of the features you have removed. Especially the target folder pane which I use every time I import to make sure the pictures end up where I want them. Also the 1:1 view in the import dialog is key to avoid importing all “Reject” pics. I cannot understand why you remove features that work well for so many photographers. If they are preventing new users from figuring out how to use LR then simply hide them initially and allow us that do use them to enable them in preferences or Expert mode.
LR is to me a pro-tool, although I am an amateur enthusiast. You would never consider dumbing down PS like this, or maybe that’s a plan as well. Amateurs that will not take the time to learn such basic features such as importing should maybe stick with apps like Elements. All they need to do is watch a video on YouTube or buy a book. After all, if they cannot figure out import, how are they going to get to know all the other powerful features in LR. Don’t even mention the learning curve for PS. That also requires some studying in the beginning.
I was days away from starting my subscription to the Photography package to get to the latest version but you gave me a really good reason to save my money and stay away. Easiest decision in a long time.
The only thing sensible at this time is to revert back all removed features, suck it up and admit the mistake, and rethink how to move forward. And listen to your customers instead of just focusing on usability studies with new novice users and your app analytics that I always turn off.

Lastly, keep LR a tool for advanced users, novice users and fine with elements. If you try to shoot for all types of users, you end up missing them all and a competing brand will likely take your place eventually.

Hands down: What I REALLY like to hear from Adobe is an answer to ONE SIMPLE QUESTION:
– Who are your Clients for Lightroom?

Point! If you, ADOBE, say: “We like to build the best Photo-RAW-Tool for professionals” (professionals means “they earn money with it”) – Then you should QUICKLY change your mindset! Fix problems (speed, memory consumption), Improve Things you havn’t looked it since the very first version (Keyword-Organisation-Tool anyone? Having a definitive order of keywords in export for Stock-Agencies, etc.)
I don’t need a toy for 80 Bucks or less – I need a helpful tool, a time-saver. I’m happy to pay 300 Bucks if the Software ROCKS!!
Don’t make the mistake Apple made when rewriting the Desktop-Versions of iWork by reducing it to the low feature set of the iOS-Versions (just to be compatible)

But – If ADOBE says: “We need a cool looking Photo-App ‘for everybody else’, it needs to be ‘as simple’ as an iPhone-App” – then… well… Go, move on your way making a shiny new toy BUT TELL US! Then we can start going on to some other solutions.

for the records:
– Eject after Import. I put in 3 to 6 SD-Cards after a shooting – HUGE Timesaver. On Workshops i get 20+ SD-Cards in 20 Minutes to import one or two images from each. HUGE HUGE Timesaver
– showing Filename. On Workshops (on private by myself) i get the number of the filename which i need to import and i scroll down until i see that name. Doing that with Tooltip? No freakin’ way! If you don’t bring back that option, i will move to finder doing my import with Drag&Drop from there! … Until to remove Drag&Drop of course… I’m sure nearly no one in your records are using D&D – right?
– displaying the resulting filepath. HUGE tool to avoid errors! I was showing around this feature to other companies as a great example how to visualize “what will happen” before the fact. I was checking that a lot when switching catalogues
…i could go on and on…

Why dumb down a complicated import process once pro users have figured out which options are important to them and base their workflow on them? Have a newby option by all means, but don’t throw out the “lesser used features” just to keep the selfie crowd happy. To remove functionality from a leading software solution is like cutting your nose to spite your face.
Please bring back the lost features, even if we have to dig around to find them!

Performance is poor ever since 6 came out and despite the update the performance is still poor. whether a high end PC or Mac, turning on the GPU even though the video cards supported and with the latest driver does nothing and this need to be fixed. In fact turn it off and you gain some minimal improvement!
As you say you knew about a bug and yet still shipped sounds too me like another Volkswagen in the making!
Surely you must recognize that professional photographers use your product and demand advance settings not only on import but performance which is still lacking, we have businesses to run, we don’t have time for this nonsense!

You have never heard from me before but I have been a LR user since the beginning–actually before the beginning because I owned the program you bought to convert to LR so I was grandfathered into LR. I’ve never written you because LR has done everything I’ve needed. Sure, it’s taken me a few trips around the import page to make sure I got everything right but there it was, all I need to import my files, rename them, check, their names, make certain of the paths as to what drives they were going to and where the back up was going to be, what preset I might want, and then at the end, unmount my card. Wow–all in one place, follow the path around the page across the top to the right bottom–what could be more simple. It has allowed me to keep track of 3 TB of image files across several computers, multiple hard drives, and several image platforms while visiting and photographing 7 Continents. I was worth switching to paying monthly for that ability. But now–wow, it hardly works and many of the features I use in my import flow are gone. What can I say–I’m flabbergasted!. I’ve uninstalled this unmitigated disaster and reinstalled LR 6.1.1 because I’m on my way to Madagascar for a month and I hope you have this resolved and the functionality restored by the time I return otherwise you won’t ever hear from me again and it won’t be because I’m such a satisfied user–it will be because I’m no longer a user at all. Ten years down the drain–

I am still unable to use the second update this week. I can’t even get to the infamous “Import” screen. The program is now slow and very unresponsive to my commands. Twice this week I had to roll back the update to LR 6.1.1 the last stable one.

How much beta testing was included in this update. The out lash from the user community speaks volumes. Please take it to heart.

Do the Lightroom guys ever talk to the Photoshop team? Photoshop has figured out this configurability challenge a long time ago, and with great customer acceptance. How about a “workspace” capability with pre-defined “beginner” and “advanced” profiles? Photoshop has proven that wide customization can be implemented. Isn’t it worth a look?

As soon as I had upgraded my MacBookPro to El Capitan I downloaded and installed all the upgrades to the various softwares that I use. Only apps to give troubles: Lightroom and Bridge CC. Unistalled and re-installed them a few times. Ran the updates. Now Lightroom is crashing every time I Export files:-((((((((( Unistalled it and subsequently installed release 5, which is working fine as usual. But I’m f******g paying you for the CC version!!!!!!!!

I know the rhetoric is “Lightroom for everyone.” But who actually believes that’s possible? Courting radically different users means compromise, and since casual snapshooters outnumber professionals exponentially, “Lightroom for everyone” clearly means that professionals are going to draw the short straw more often than not.

Hey, I don’t blame you, Tom. You’re looking at those 400 million happy Instagrammers out there and wondering how to slice yourself a piece of that very, very profitable pie. And’ve got a nervous eye on Apple and Google, who’ve jumped wholesale from courting professionals (Aperture + Mac, the Nik collection) to locking in the snapshooter set (iPhone-iCloud-Photos, Android+Snapseed+GooglePhotos). You’ve got to get in on that before it’s too late!

We all know casual photographers are a fantastic market–they’re growing like tribbles (while working professionals dwindle) and they’re comparatively easy to serve. Snapshooters don’t have complicated “workflows,” legacy needs, or persnickety tastes. And it’s so much easier to lock snapshooters into an “ecosystem.” Creative pros worry about proprietary formats, extensibility, ownership, rights . . . yikes. Snapshooters just want convenience–offer a slick shot-to-share cloud archive and they’re yours for the foreseeable future.

Anyway: thanks for the heartfelt apology, and good luck with “Lightroom for everyone.” I myself will be spending more and more time with Phase One’s Capture One, but I’ll check in now and then to see how you’re doing!

While I appreciate the apology, it still deploys some of the same excuses as before, is somewhat of an insult to your experienced users, and ultimately is essentially meaningless without any mention of concrete changes, much less a full rollback that it seems huge numbers of people are requesting.

“The import experience in Lightroom is daunting. It’s a step that every customer must successfully take in order to use the product and overwhelming customers with every option in a single screen was not a tenable path forward. ”

Overwhelming? Honestly, I’m pretty insulted. It was not too long ago, not much more than a year, that I first starting using LR5 after going the Bridge-ACR-PS CS6 workflow for several years, so I still remember what it was like to be new to the whole thing. Even then, though, I never remember having any real problem with the UI itself, much less somehow becoming “overwhelmed.” Sure, some of the more detailed options required Googling to get the most out of, but as a product aimed at advanced hobbyist and professional photographers, that’s to be expected, honestly. If the only options were easy enough that Joe Schmo off the street could figure them out, then what am I getting paid for? Plus, any experience you are referring to is only even troublesome (and even still, expected, for that matter, with most advanced products) for the first few times one uses the software.

For anyone who’s picked up some experience using the program regularly, e.g. the vast majority of times people are using the dialog, it is a hindrance having fewer features and less easy access to them–but unlike new users, we already forked over our hard-earned cash to purchase your program, or are paying every month to not loose access to it, so it makes some level of short term economic sense. Pretending it is anything but that is fundamentally disingenuous to your experienced userbase.

“At the same time we removed some of our very low usage features to further reduce complexity and improve quality.”

So first you hide all your high usage features features behind multiple levels of clicking to even view their status, and then you remove the “low usage features” entirely? Please tell me, as I’ve heard this multiple times from lightroom employees, how on Earth “removing features” that were fully functional “improve quality”? How? It is utterly baffling to me.

“In making these changes without a broader dialog I’ve failed the original core values of the product and the team.”

Yes, you have. The most (and perhaps the only) genuine and meaningful statement in the entire “apology.” Honestly, the whole thing would have come off a lot better if you’d started rather than a long list of excuses as to why the failure occurred. You deserve some credit for this sentence, but sadly it is overshadowed by everything else that was there, and most notably what was not, namely any concrete action whatsoever.

“The team will continue to work hard to earn your trust back in subsequent releases and I look forward to reigniting the type of dialog we started in 2006.”

That’s all well and good, but it means *nothing* without at least *something* concrete to address your users’ #1 concern right now, which is this issue, as nowhere do you promise *anything* will be done to assuage the problems with the new UI and removed features. Given a proper “dialogue” involves listening to the other side, the fact that you clearly haven’t here in any meaningful way indicates your whole promise of “earning trust” and “dialogue” rings utterly hollow when you still refuse to listen and respond to your core userbase in their most vocal complaint propbably since that 2006 you refer to.

Honestly, if this is how I can expect to be treated by the Lightroom team now and in the future, LR 5.7 will be the last version I buy. Unless I see concrete action on this issue, after already being burned on Creative Cloud befre, I’ll have no reason to doubt that Adobe simply doesn’t care aobut its dedicated userbase when that seemingly stands in the way of extracting money from the poor, clueless newbies who stumble across their program and think that having what was once a reliable, professional tool will somehow make them a good photographer. And if that truly must be the case, then I’ll close with this: Goodnight and good luck, Adobe. You’ll need it.

Thank you for your apology because Adobe really messed up. I must say however, that statements like this from a previous post “The previous Import experience literally made people push back from their computers in frustration. Keeping the existing Import experience isn’t an option, and we needed to evolve the Import experience.” just makes me (and others I’m sure) feel that our complaints don’t mean much to Adobe and you are going to go on your merry way regardless.

I have to say that I believe if you really took a large sampling of existing users you wouldn’t have made those changes. Eject, move and destination, for instance, are features frequently used by LR users and shouldn’t be removed or put behind a gear menu (you want to talk frustration?!). LR has been designed as a professional solution and as such, it needs to provide a complete and flexible workflow for professional users. It shouldn’t be a workflow necessitating additional steps so that it will be simple enough for novice users who wouldn’t miss those steps.

So is Adobe planning on dumbing down Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premier Pro etc. so that they will not intimidate new users? Take a poll and I’m sure that you will find that most of your longtime users were intimidated or frustrated by Adobe’s applications but we sat our butts down and did what we had to do to learn how to use them as they were designed. You want Lightroom to be easy, then create a new app: Lightroom Elements.

You want to earn our trust and keep us as users? Listen to our frustrations, put things back the way they were and next time, how about figuring out a way to do a poll of an accurate cross section of your users before you kneecap the app?

How about the fact that panorama from RAW files from Leica got broken in this new update? I spent hours with Adobe on the phone while you guys were telling me that my files were bad and it was my fault that the panoramas weren’t working only to then (both me and the woman at Adobe) try the panorama with the same files on an older version of Lightroom and voilà! It works! Do you guys plan on fixing that sometime soon?

It is hard to know where to start in responding to this chaotic fiasco.

* Is it wilful publishing of “crashy” software under a subscription model that was sold to us on the basis that we would get features as and when they were ready, rather than when Marketing demanded?
* Is it the bone-headed problem identification and half-cock solution?
* Or is it the peek ahead to our destination, on the magical mystery tour that Adobe seems to be taking us?

It is like watching an episode of the Apprentice. You can imagine the bright young hot shots getting their power points up and observing that billions of photos are being published / shared but the more committed / professional photography market is only small percentage of that. What they need to do is find out what it is that is preventing their products from reaching the wider market. After all, Apple (which makes money from cameras (aka phones), and selling storage), Google (which makes money from harvesting data from stored photos, and a bit from storage), et al, are doing well in that “space”, partly due to a “no brainer” workflow. Adobe is danger of being written out of the script because it offers only software, which it turns out the others can do almost as well, for the large, and growing, non-specialist audience.

So they send out market researchers to find out what it is that is blocking Lightroom adoption. Ingesting the photos via a cluttered, poorly structured screen turn out to be a point of resistance.

Lipstick is duly applied to the pig, in a mock-up, by the newest intern, who is too young to have heard of the Microsoft Wizard concept (which sounds even more patronising than a simplified screen, but which works very well for a multi-step process) and marketing, on seeing a demo, changes the background picture to the dialogue and presses the “ship” button, to market test reactions.

They have a new vision. It is one of producing Lightroom Elements, over the longer term, a module at a time. It is quite clear that the (locked in) old timers are attached to their complicated and effete / elite eject buttons, they want to move files, and not import duplicates, as well as seeing where they are putting their pictures. The solution is obvious — in-App purchasing: $0.50 / month to bring up your file tree, $1 / month to be able to preview your imports. It’s a no brainer. Trebles all ‘round. Lock and load (should it not be the other way around?) baby, etc, you can imagine the contestants cry, as they high five as if they were from the ‘hood, without trust funds.

More lipstick is applied and a few of the more egregious bugs are squashed. The market testing team goes out again and a few more people do not push back at the initial experience.

Being aspiring Apprentices, they lack the wit and wisdom of their master, who can see several steps ahead. He can see that the “reimagined” solution of a simplified dialogue that satisfies neither those that don’t understand folder structures, nor those that do, turns out to be a blind alley.

The master realises that the guinea pigs will soon discover that while they can now, with a following wind, get their pictures into Lightroom, and even learn to adjust them a bit, they find that they have a solid vertical wall to climb if they want to get them out.

* Slideshows are fine, but it is never very clear which pictures are going to participate.
* Printing pictures, the USP of Lightroom, leads to a mind-blowing dialogue (assuming that the newbie finds it, as the module names do not look like buttons) even without trying to avoid both Lightroom and the printer thing to do color management.
* So does the newbie export the pictures or run some plug-in to get them out, risking an encounter with the file system? S/he eventually finds that s/he can also publish them, although it is never very clear which route out is best, which requires the establishment of collection (and whether that should be smart or not). They never get to Bechance because it is not clear what it does.

So it soon dawns on our guinea pigs that sharing pictures with friends and elderly relatives requires more effort than they are prepared to put in: they are not pretending to be artists, but want to create emotional connections. Going to regex.info and downloading a plug-in that allows the households under test to post to Instagram, as the post on that website recommends, seems a bridge too far.

Result: Adobe has a version of Lightroom that is neither fish nor fowl. It doesn’t satisfy the pros (who find ingestion slow and inflexible (leaving space for Photo Mechanic to thrive) and the newbies find that Apple or, at a pinch, Google Photos may be limited, but they do the job that the majority require, while not satisfying those with more specialised needs.

I hope that Adobe / Tom will offer us an alternative vision of the future, but the portents are not encouraging.

I agree. I was completely blind-sided when I tried to run an import. My workflow was pretty much gutted, the time to import went UP. The message from Adobe? Gee, we need to “build trust” and “communicate better”. No mention of FIXING the problem. Welcome to marketing aimed only at new sales. Right now Lightroom has no real competition. Hopefully someone will see the opportunity and give us an option.

Software users (which means everyone) is used to having bugs in newly released software. There are few if any major programs that don’t have a dot release to correct unforeseen conflicts that occur in an almost infinite variety of computer configurations. That’s just the way it is.
Each time a new release comes out and it doesn’t perform in the way its advertised, users go through an analysis of their download, was it complete, did it hang up somewhere? The next step is to determine whether the equiment is functioning properly, has the equipment finally reached the point where it is no longer adequate to the task? If those searches don’t provide answers then delving into blogs and websites to see if anyone else is experiencing the same problems. Discovering that the user is not alone brings some comfort because you realize you didn’t mess up the install. Next step is to find out how to roll back to a version that actually works for you.
How many hours? All that time delay before a professional trying to earn a living can get back to production.
The worst part of Lightroom 6.2 release is the statement from Mr. Hogarty: “we made the incorrect decision to ship with the bug”
That most certainly was incorrect. That blatant disregard for interests of Adobe clients is inexcusable.
My go-to version of Light Room remains at LR 5.7, which is the last full stand alone package I purchased before subscribing to CC. It may be some time before I trust my efforts in a CC release.
Gary Anderson

I have to add my voice to the hundreds of complaints about the changes to the Import Module. As a working pro, I use all the functions and they are critical to my work flow. Importing and managing is the most important function of Lightroom and by eliminating, hiding, and requiring multiple mouse clicks you have handicapped the entire process. I import thousands of photographs and have prized the ability to easily change file names, add metadata, use presets, and create new destination folders and load into dated folders.

It is not a simple process, but is teachable. If you need a simplified “Import Light” module, please do so, but please give us the ability to continue using the advanced functions.

If you’re keeping count, here’s another vote for having the “eject after import” feature added back in. This greatly affects the workflow of professional photographers who import multiple cards at once.

thank you for the apology, but I need to agree 100% to statement of Jim Goshorn. I am a Lightroom user since the early beginning. Unfortunately since a few version I got the feeling that there is a big intension to spread LR to more and more users by making it more simple. I was fine with that because its a great tool as long as further pro features will be also added. With last update all my worries became true. The redesign of the import dialogue was never meant to have any benefit to pro users according to my understanding. (I expect, the majority of pro users are able to use old dialogue according their workflow since years, if you dont believe than you dont know your customers). The update was meant to make Lightroom more easy to get a higher market share for consumer user, (which is from business point of view fully understandable).
BUT why did you remove features? Why do you think you know what your customers want without asking them?
What is the future target audience for Lightroom? If you want to get higher market share, please release the from Jim suggested LR elements and keep on improving the Lightroom CC version in performance and stability.

I am hoping that the current buggy, notatallsatisying version will be reflected deeply in your team and appropriate countermeasures will be taken that such kind of version will be never released again.( not blaming any programmer, because I expect they were not pushing to release 6.2 before solving all issues)
If the CC will continue to be used in same understanding as “beta tester”, please inform….

Anyway at the moment I am still convinced about the product and hoping the issues can be solved soon.
Just my thoughts on the topic after spending several hours with crashes and rolleback.

Professionals use these features SEVERAL times DAILY!!!! Unbelievable that there wouldn’t even be an option to “show advanced features” so that my LR workflow can return to normal. I now have tons of extra work getting my workflow organized. If that’s what you mean by “easier,” Tom, then you got it! Please give an option to enable these features in a future update. Especially the “eject card on import” option if nothing else. I am confident you and the team will take the correct measures to repair this ungodly mess. Don’t forget who makes this program possible: PROFESSIONALS.

Add me to the list of unhappy customers that uses some of the removed features.

What a waste of design and development effort the new import process was. You could have used that effort to make Lightroom better at what it already does. I am very invested in Lightroom, but it is SLOW, unbelievably SLOW. I put up with it though, because I’m not sure what else covers the same level of organisational features with processing features and I have a large catalogue already there. It is a very ‘sticky’ product, but it feels more like being held to random rather than a positive thing.

The new import dialog is the worst one i have ever seen. it is so confusing I couldn’t even see what my setting on saved import presets. Please give the old one back. Is there any way to get it back or do i have to revert to the older version? Very disappointed. It is not clear what most of the items in impot do. I wasted 2 hours trying to figure it out to make a preset that worked similar to one I had, I figured out the old inport dialog in 15 minutes and was happy with it.

Thanks for including old manual focus Minolta lenses in the update. But what about just regular Minolta lenses that perfectly autofocus on Sony A mount (and FE mount with adapters)? Can you guys please include Minolta lenses profiles??? There are tons of popular lenses with good Autofocus that many A mount and FE mount owners use: Minolta 80-200/2.8, 70-210/4, 50 1.4, 100/2, 100/2.8, 200/2.8, 85/1.4G and many others. You went for old manual lenses but skipped these???? Please include profiles for those in the next firmware if possible. Thanks a lot!!!!

My heart sank when I read about the new release. Not just for the missing features – which are used by me and everyone I know and have caused widespread dismay – but because of what I perceived as a change of direction for a wonderful pro product that we who make our living from images have come to rely on. To make vital changes based on a focus group of inexperienced amateurs had me really worried. What direction is this going in? was my thought.

Your fulsome apology Tom is very welcome, and it cannot have been an easy thing to do, but it will only redeem you and your team in my eyes and hundreds of others if it results in you putting those missing features back. By all means hide them to keep an uncluttered interface in the way the best Apple software does. You do not specifically say you will put them back in 6.3, so a statement to that effect would be most welcome.

Yes, Everything that was said in the statement before me!!!!!!!
I just subscribed to Creative Cloud, as a matter of fact my second charge just went through today. If this is what I have to look forward to…. changes to my product that do not benefit me, what a grave mistake I have made indeed!

I was fortunate that I saw the input on the web before I saw the downloads. I will not be updating until things are made right again. What a sad state for the wonderful software. I am counting on the features being returned!

After reading Mr Hogarty’s apology I have to ask “Who is Lightroom’s target audience, professional photographers who are looking to streamline their workflow and reduce overhead or armature/hobbyists who are just looking for an option to manage their baby photos?” as a professional the auto-eject and move operations are huge for my workflow, especially when you consider I’m sometimes managing multiple shoots a day for different customers. It’s would be nice to get clarification from Adobe on this.

Considering we’re at version 6 and still have no network support for the catalog, I’m thinking Adobe is targeting the hobbyist, but I’ve tilted at the that windmill for too long, so I’ll leave it be.

Tom,
I still cant believe YOU are dumbing down the interface from what the pros are used to and use everyday to make their living to an interface that the selfie crowd is more comfortable with, I am just shaking my head in disbelief…

To orient the ui and features simply on the (representative?) amount of usage is a fallacy, it stops LR’s appeal as an app that keeps up with the knowledge you gain.

If it’s just about usage, what features will be next on the kill list? I imagine about 1/4 of the sliders in the develop module, probably including the tone curve that keeps confusing new users about the difference to the basic sliders.

Adobe, as a gesture of good faith please restore the removed features from the import dialog to an advanced (default hidden) tab in a quick 6.2.2, and *then* think again what really isn’t deemed necessary by your *existing* users.

For me, please start with restoring “move” – the removal breaks my whole work flow (rate/tag before import & manual export/process/re-import, all on the same hd). Whoever got confused by that option? Do you insist users do it all inside LR now that you’ve got those fancy (lacking) hdr & pano options?

PS. I am so very happy that I didn’t upgrade to 6.2.X on my primary workstation. It will remain at 6.1.X for the foreseeable future, e.g., until my CC subscription expires. Then there are other choices 🙂

Tom,
As I was rolling back from LR CC2015.2 to the previous version, I recalled when I was first working with LR and could download the beta version. That was a superb approach. I suspect it hasn’t been used lately, but also suspect if it had, the problems everyone has noted, would have been corrected.

LR is a great product. I use it daily. It’s essential to my work.

I support the idea of the option to select import settings for various levels of users. One size can’t fit all.

Remove eject after import not being used? Adobe needs to reconsider putting this back. What I do know is there are far fewer professionals using LR than there are amateurs. So for that, we pay the price. What was the big deal about leaving it in? Did it confuse anyone?

There was nothing broken about import that in my history of digital imaging which goes back to Triple-I in the seventies, that needed fixing. So after scanning all of this, I have a fix for the broken update– I’m not updating.

It’s pretty simple. LightRoom is going after the middle 80% of the market, which is dominated by prosumers and entry level users. I don’t blame them. For every advanced user (professionals and enthusiasts who actively hone their craft) there are ten users who get confused by the idea of manual camera controls and f stops and software with multiple sliders to make the picture “brighter” or “more colorful”.

If you’re a pro and are looking for pro software then Capture One Pro is the answer. They don’t care about the prosumer or the just-learning photographer; they make their software for pros who need functionality, power, and speed over simplicity. They focus on workflow and quality of the raw conversion in ways that Adobe does not.

The dumbed-down Import function is a disaster! My whole cataloging system of 750,000+ photos is filed on external hard drives that remain off-line and on an on-line Drobo. I need to be able to import duplicates and that was never a problem with LR5. Please listen to your professional users and bring back the old Import function.

Before the recent ‘updates’, as a user of the standalone version of LR I was on the point of moving to the CC version. Over the past few hours I’ve been researching Capture One instead, and find myself sorely tempted. One can even import one’s LR catalog! That will make the transition a lot easier.
Actually taking out features critical to discerning users is to betray the ideals LR was founded on. Unless the trend to dumbing down is reversed, starting with the reimplementation of the original import dialog in the next update, I will be taking my dollars elsewhere.

Not to mention that I have to agree with most comments on the horrible import dialog changes, but importing doesn’t work for me at all. I tried importing 105 raw files with the latest update today, after figuring out how to use the new import dialog I hit the import button then as usual LR presented me with the library pane and the previous import section of the catalog, but importing got stuck after 3 files. I quit LR an then I copied the files from the sd card using apples image capture, back to LRs import dialog, this time I selected the files from the hard drive folder, hit import and the same happened, import got stuck after 5 files. The I tried synchronizing the folder, wich managed to import 35 of 105 files into my catalog after 6 hours…….

I can only say that this LR update is just a shame for Adobe, it seems their man power is getting concentrated at pushing out more and more smartphone apps, very professional indeed … thanks adobe for choosing that path, by the way why am I still paying 12€ a month????

Thank you Tom Hogarty for acknowledging some of the issues, and even fixing some of the bugs. But I agree with the majority above, I still feel like you’ve missed the biggest concern – the missing features and the complete lack of respect shown to long time users.

Just because someone completely new to Lightroom can’t understand every last button, slider and other settings withing 60 seconds of starting the program doesn’t mean you start removing options! It means either you’re targeting the wrong customer or you haven’t done a good job with the help/training features. Guess what people – this is a complicated program that does a lot of complicated tasks. It’s not Instagram where you slap a filter on and call it a day. If you DO want to attract new customers with a simpler version, then great, please do. Photography is a rapidly expanding hobby. But if you want a stripped down version, sell a stripped down version. And leave the advanced features alone for those that *already paid for them.* I’m paying for software than I can both edit and manage files with. The biggest thing setting Lightroom apart from other software is the file management. Take that away and why shouldn’t I go to other companies that realize why I bought their software instead of throwing me under the bus for someone too impatient to learn the tool they just bought.

the problem my be ar ein the gpu grphic accellerated card… i have update the last one one hour ago but the problem are the same: when i go to production when i change information in the imagine, ad change my strumets the sistem block and never, i must restart.

“At the same time we removed some of our very low usage features to further reduce complexity and improve quality…”
You obviously refer to another program,i don`t know it sorry.
Let me speak about LR instead.If the features “Eject Card after Import” ,”Move photos to a new location”,the Destination folder tree etc are very low usage then you should WIPE OUT the Book & Web Module,keywords,curves,the watermark dialog box and the Export dialog box .
I`m sure that your new target group users : the Instagram Hipster DON`T ever use or understand those!
Biggest FAIL in Lightroom`s History
We want the Professional ‘Import’ dialog box BACK!!

To say that I am angry would be putting it mildly. I was forced to update today when features were disengaged (smugmug export) by the availability of the new update. I came to my computer to discover a “welcome to the new Lightroom” screen. Without having opted for automatic updates, I was certainly perplexed, especially as I was in the middle of exporting and uploading 2,500 images from Fashion Week. Many hours later I have work going through LR 4, but in the meantime I have an editor screaming at me, designers waiting, and models breathing down my neck (and no, not in a good way.) Why, Adobe, why would you ship with known bugs and force me to upgrade?

Oh, and as many others have noted before me, bring back the Import screen!!! I have two client shoots from today that I am importing, and this mess of ‘simple’ reminds me of the photo kiosks at CVS. Sure, you can get your prints done, but every professional photographer is going to run in the other direction. A friend is a Capture One Pro ambassador… time to go get a discount.

I’ve read many of the comments and I’m in total agreement. You have broken or removed key features for professional photographers. LR is aimed at professional photographers! You and your team have shown complete incompetence and lack of respect for your customer. You and your team should be FIRED!

My request/DEMAND is that you admit you screwed up and IMMEDIATELY roll back to the previous version that WORKED.

I’ve read many of the comments and I’m in total agreement. You have broken or removed key features for professional photographers. LR is aimed at professional photographers! You and your team have shown complete incompetence and lack of respect for your customer. You and your team should be FIRED!

My request/DEMAND is that you admit you screwed up and IMMEDIATELY roll back to the previous version that WORKED.

This is what you get when you eliminate the QA process in an effort to increase profits.
I have to laugh at the apology… sounded good until you read Tom’s ONLY response to user’s comment to date.
I used the auto eject option religiously so I question the data Adobe used to justify eliminating that feature.
Whatever happened to: “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it”?

The more I think about this the more I think it’s time to start looking for an alternative to Adobe. If Adobe is losing interest in serious photographers, them I’m going to lose interest in Adobe. Not a threat, just a fact.

I really miss the auto eject feature. Means I have one more step to go before I can put the card back in the camera. I don’t remove images from the card for several days when I know they are fully backed up.

So why put a big check mark in the middle of the import candidate? I really don’t get that.

The import module has always had an interface somewhat inconsistent with the overall app. So be it…gotten used to that. But, I would have thought that Adobe would have attempted to make the interface more, rather than less, consistent.

An apology is good when there is a true willingness to change and improve. Past has unfortunately shown that Adobe doesn’t listen to its users.
To give some context, I was a LR user of the first hour with versions 1 and 2 before moving to Aperture 3. With its death I returned, half heartedly, to LR.
Now that LR is in a quasi monopolistic position it is to be expected that the breadth of different workflows to perform a similar task has become quite rich but also that even when armies of users might be following a certain workflow or using certain functions, their relative number might seem small and this the use of certain options or features “infrequent”.
Especially when covering the needs of amateurs, enthousiastes and professionals it should be expected that options only used by professionals will become infrequently used but nonetheless important!
Hiding being focus groups is not sufficient to justify stripping away essential features even if only for a limited number of users!
The import tool is not critical to me, I now rely on PhotoMechanic for my imports and only later do I import in LR with metadata sitting in the sidecar file.
But this “ImportGate” reminded me of other key features that have disappeared or never made it to the apps, despite users repeatedly asking for them. Here a few, but important to me “infrequently” used features
– support for RAW+JPG
– keyword search and selection through synonyms
– image search and filtering through keyword synonyms
– Vastly increased performance of the library tool, in particular: why does performance degrade over time when working on keywords and other metadata?
– and so many more

Similar to infrastructure maintenance: repairing a road or a bridge has nothing sexy, politicians tend to ignore these unless forced to: no one has ever won an election on bridge repairs. Adobe is doing the same : it us bragging about de hazing or removing tourists on images because there are sexy, but they take resources away of the mundane but so crucial work of optimization, bug finding, leaks and all these infrequently important things.
Like many other users, I’m using LR because there is no viable alternative to my needs, yet. It is up to Adobe to show me whether I’m valued enough to satisfy my needs, though maybe infrequent.

All this is most distressing. Fortunately, one of the members in our club warned us through an email not to update and I didn’t yet. Now, I don’t know what to do. I don’t feel confident the bugs are fixed, and what Adobe seems to have done with the UI is just as distressing. I’m sticking to 6.1, with all its own issues. Maybe look elsewhere. Seems to me that Adobe’s competition just got a window of opportunity.

Must add to thegrowing list of hugely disappointed ightroom users.
Was the import dialogue so bad? Why can I no longer iport duplicates?! I appreciate things change and usally for the better but WHY REMOVE THINGS????
Please bring back the old import screen and include all the features that were there.

I’ve purchased every standalone version of Lightroom from v1.0 to 6.1.1. I was annoyed with Adobe’s decision to not provide feature updates to the the standalone but understood their need to milk the subscription model.

I almost decided to sign up for CC last week but luckily this update occurred. Sorry Adobe – I wont be signing up until I get the same import functionality as I have with the standalone product. If you want to dumb down the product to meet your ‘analytical results’ audience then at least give us a an advanced mode so we can use the features we’ve always used.

…and Tom, maybe it’s time to go back to a limited public beta. Based on what I’m reading here whatever you’re doing now isn’t working too well.

I’d like to add another vote to restore the auto-eject feature. I used it always, and dislike the manual operations that are now required to eject a card every time. Lightroom’s attraction is the way it smoothes my workflow, and removing auto-eject is a change in the opposite direction. I thought the purpose of Adobe’s subscription fees was to pay for periodic enhancements, not removal of features I use just to accomodate new users. Please put back the auto-eject, and also the display of the exact directory that my imports will go into.

Thank you for the apology. Letting us know we are heard feels good.
While Adobe figures out how to fix everything, could we, please, please just undo the upgrade? It would be like it never happened and Adobe can try again, test it properly, collaborate and make something truly amazing without rushing for a fast fix.
Everyone would GREATLY appreciate it. You literally have photographers loosing money over this. We can’t wait for a fix we just need our import process back!

It should be very clear to everyone at Adobe that these changes to the import dialogue were a bad decision. If the program is not returned to it’s previous level of functionality, I will soon be back with Capture One, for keeps. Adobe, please consider this as feedback from a longtime customer – if you alienate your loyal professional users, don’t be surprised if the rest of the userbase is close behind us as we exit. I can’t tell you how many times my clients have asked for my recommendation on the best photo program. My answer has always been Lightroom, but frankly, I don’t see that trend continuing. My advice – swallow your pride and do the right thing, quickly.

Thanks for the apology on behalf of your team. I see this as the first step towards putting things right

I already own a copy of LR v5.7 & PhotoShop CS5. In July, rather than upgrading the software I already had, I felt that it was worth taking the CC Photography subscription. Since the v2015.2 release I have had serious doubts as to whether I made the right decision. I hate the new “Improved” Import tool but I could learn to live with it, IF the old options (No need to name them all) could still be accessed.

It is a rare thing indeed to see features REMOVED in later releases of professsional software. Sometimes they are moved or hidden but still some way to access them for those who rely on them. I have now rolled back to LR 2015.1.1, primarily to resolve the removal of features which I used regularly. If those features are not returned to LR, staying on the subscription will not be practical for me as no sense in paying for a product I find makes more work for me. I will still use my LR5.7/CS5 but all new work will end up going through an alternative from one of your competitors
Regards
John Quixley

Not happy! My workflow is severely impacted. I’ve lost a lot of time and effort due to Adobe’s incompetence on this release. It’s still not working right. I get as far as the CC Adobe ID sign in and then the drop down menu goes completely blank. I never agreed to be a Beta tester!

Question to Adobe: Does Adobe consider Lightroom to be a professional-level application? Simple yes or no question, there’s no grey area here and further diatribe is not required, just yes or no. If the answer is no, then I’ll shut up, cancel my CC subscription, and complete my purchase of Phase One’s Capture One Pro 8 (which most assuredly IS a professional-level application) and you’ll never hear from me again. If the answer is yes, then I’ll wait to see what you do about the Import debacle, but I won’t wait long. In my book, it’s never ok to remove functionality from software after it has been implemented, especially based on some dumbass analytical process that most people, including myself, switch off. If you feel compelled to waste your developers time removing code and patching the hole it leaves, then at least create a forum for the users of the software and get input from real people.

Barry said it succinctly: Lightroom is a pro application or it is not. Regardless of the answer, it is clear from this botched release that the development staff for Lightroom do not even begin to meet the definition of pros. I have downloaded Capture One and began to work. If Adobe comes around to accepting the fact that their professional user base is the one that Adobe owes allegiance to and is willing to demonstrate that Adobe deserves our trust, then I will come back. But not before, and not after too much time…say a couple of workdays.
Get off your butts Adobe, and get to work. Fix this.

Barry and I are of like minds. I’ve already been splitting my image processing time between Adobe and Phase One. Lightroom’s comprehensive import and file management features are what has kept Adobe in the game for me. If you’re going to dumb Lightroom down, I’m out.

There apology is nice, but what you plan to do about it is far more important.

How about telling us what is next? Should I un-install and roll back to 6.1 or are you going to fix this properly in the next few days. 6.2.1 is worse than the first release, and did not fix anything for me.

The conflict between the idea that as perpetual license user I am not entitled to dehaze and the fact that I am offered an “improved import” with the new version 6.2 is clearly showing new attitude from Adobe. I was stupid enough to believe that Adobe will not abandon long time users community which helped the company to create wonderful tool for professionals and advanced amateurs and I tied my workflow to close to Lightroom. I am forced to rethink my strategy and the first step is to stop converting nef files to dng in order to open the path to alternatives. Cloud subscribe model, dumbed Lightroom, no thank you Adobe.

6.2 is obviously not working the way it should. I cannot access my main menu, except on start up holding down shift and opt. Please consider a patch that enables a return to 6.1 until 6.2 is fixed. That would enable not having to uninstall 6.2 and then having to download 6.1. That solution would give you the time needed to do the much needed repair work.

Anyone can remove features to make it simpler. But true elegance is making it appear simple while in fact being complex. What Adobe did is just removed things and that is not good enough. Keep it simple looking if you want to but don’t remove any features, find a way to implement them.

I am an enthusiast photographer that bought in to the CC offering early in the life of LR5. As software users ‘we’ are too often subjected to poorly tested releases, so I could get past that aspect of this release of LR. In my years of being a user of creative software I have had my share of tools withdrawn – including by Adobe, I can understand the economics of those events. What I may not be able or willing to get past is the reduction of capability of the import functionality of LR. I undertood LR to be a tool for photographers, and one which was growing in strength. As it stands the import function is excellent AND the more I use it, the more I use its abilities. Why do this to your loyal users? To make it easier for less technical users to buy in to LR? By all means build a switch into the program – give users a choice. Issue an Elements version of LR. Add LR functions to PSE. Anything other than what you have done.

I too have downloaded Capture One with an eye on the Adobe exit door. I also use other parts of CC so pay Adobe several hundred pounds every year. Just as there are alternatives to LR and PS, there are alternatives to Premiere. I’m giving Adobe until the end of the month, then I’ll most likely be gone too.

Managed to get to the menu now, but have to use force quit to get out of the program. Plus it seems to take a lot longer then before for the backupThis is a very disappointing experience and not up to the standard one usually expects from Adobe.

If users couldn’t be bothered to learn how to use the old import feature I have to ask what on earth they were they doing using Lightroom in the first place?

Fortunately for me I use Photo Mechanic by Camerabits as it has far superior ingest and captioning options with LIGHTNING speed previews, even from the biggest files. I hope Camerabits will never be sold to a conglomerate such as Adobe as they would screw it up.

Hi
Coming from LR 4.4 I’ll switched to LR 6 because of the new performance optimized graphics card support.
LR4.4 License is still existing and in use, because of 32bit support for my laptop.

What I got is:
– Slower Import then before
– much more Memory consuming then before (6.2 tends to crash, because 16GB of Ram seems to be to few)
– lagging sliders / GUI
– slow update of Raster View (“G”)
– the new import is…. is absolutely unusable! (put me on the list please!)
– the face detection is a bad joke, isn’t it? Slow, memory consuming, unreliable (lost most of my work and quit it).
– Why I can’t export catalogs to former LR versions?? How should I use my LR 4.4 on my Laptop now?
– at every corner I’m pushed to use CC, and other cloud based services. What do you think I’ve bought LR 6 for?
I don’t want any of this cloud stuff at all.
– I payed 160€ to join this beta test!!!

I’m absolute unhappy with this trend in LR.
If you want to develop LR to some sort of Picasa competitor, you missed the point what LR is for…
regards

Take a look at an ideal Photographers’ replacement for Lightroom and Photoshop. Written from the ground up. Release 10 coming next month. Very stable.
Perfect Photo Suite 9, soon to be renamed ON1 Photo 10. I LOVE it.

Thanks for the apology.
If you want to earn back the lost trust you can start by acknowledging the many functional issues, instead of pretending that all that happened was a buggy release.
Also, it accomplishes very little to increase pre-release communication if all you intend to do in the future is to dumb down the product in order to lure new users to buy in on a product they will use a few times before moving on to the ‘next big thing’.
You and your team might also want to read up on how QuarkXpress lost its entire market to Indesign. Tables are turned and you are right now on the Xpressway downhill.

I posted 12 hours ago and came back here to see if anyone had added anything. Wow! It took me half an hour to read back to my post and then another hour to read on up until I gave up. And still the side slider was only a short way up the window. Every post was critical, I did not see one that was for the changes. I have never seen such a reaction to a software change, ever.

So I repeat my request to Tom. Restore our faith by announcing the changes will be put back soon. I have never even considered changing to Capture One before, but many of these posts have made me take another look at it, and many of the issues I had with it before have been resolved. I have started the 30 day trial and I hope, and I really mean this, that you announce you will put back the changes to LR before my 30 days are up so I can stay with LR. Then I will know your apology was for real and not spin. As well as a pro photographer and designer I run courses for serious amateurs and other pros. In the past I have always said “get Lightroom – no contest”. Now I will be holding off on that recommendation until I see whether the developers and suits at LR can come to their senses.

Exactly my thoughts in terms of admittedly suggesting Lightroom to new photographers. Photoshop itself almost has a bad connotation to it, like you are “cheating” if you use it (we all know this is not truth though). But Lightroom was the GOLD standard for post processing; Simple, yet powerful and intuitive; 98% of my post processing was done in Photoshop.

Lucky for me, I still have my hard copy of LR5 and have refused to use LR6 at all. To me, this debacle is part of a six month pattern of poor updates, lack of attention to detail and a clear communication from Adobe that they are no longer taking their products seriously.

I had not used import since the last update, and now there’s a new import interface I do not recognize. What was so wrong with the previous (traditional) import interface that you had to mess with? I read people complaining about the auto-eject feature but actually, for me, it’s the whole redesign that messes things up. The way it was before was simple enough. Why fix what’s not broken? Bad, bad move…

By basing your decisions so heavily on analytics and pure metrics without any depth or vision, you are looking only at clicks and ignoring the actual people using your product. Never, ever ignore your customer, but you should never let your customer design your product for you.

Look at what happened with Final Cut Pro – the gold standard of professional NLE software abandoned the professional and went from the industry leader to a dead-end product. Apple handed over their most vocal supporters to Adobe and Avid. I’m sure if you chat with the Premiere team they will verify the huge bump in usage.

Migrating my 750,000+ images to Capture One would be a major pain in the ass, but it would be a better solution than being bound to a poorly designed product.

As someone who doesn’t just use LR as a big part of professional workflow but also teaches PS and LR, the last changes have been a serious issue. I have no problem with a different, easier to understand import dialogue, but why can’t there be an “expert” option, giving all options back to those who use the software daily? It goes into the same as the fact that we can’t create our own keyboard shortcuts as example, it simply doesn’t make sense.

Making software more accessible and easier to use is fine, but it shouldn’t be hindering those who use it as part of their work. Offer both, a simplified and an expert mode, and everyone would be happy.

Additionally, the single most asked for “feature” is speed and stability. New visuals and features such as dehaze etc are fine, but should not take away development circles from optimising what we already have and use. I personally would love to teach people how to create awesome books as example, but since the book modules was introduced, it still doesn’t allow for custom designs (just as another example).

LR is brilliant and I enjoy using and teaching it, but I hope we see a few updates that focus on optimisation rather than any new features.

Put me on the list of totally p… off customers. Subscribing to the CC photographers program was a no brainer for me, but I´m scared now about what to expect in the future. Im not a pro, but the import dialog was easy enough to handle for me or anyone who can handle a dslr or any modern cameras menu system. I was happy to find the auto eject feature one day. Please don´t remove any more features and bring back the old dialog. It was a joy to work with and there are lots of easy alternatives out there.
Get back to reason or it seems you will loose a lot of your core customers and recommenders of Lightroom in very short time.

I want the old screen back and functions. I have been using LR since version 1 when Aperature was the other competitor. I have had issues with the import of photos, but I figure it out. It’s not that hard. Kits too late to keep it simple stupid (kiss). This is another reason to just use bridge.

This is enormously frustrating. I’ve never had this much trouble with a software update before. I spent most of a day trying to figure out what was wrong with my system and why it was freezing up. I finally concluded that the problem seemed to be related to LR. When I googled it, I found this page.

I was a little encouraged when I read about the “fix”. I was immediately discouraged when I realized that my copy of LR was already at 6.2.1 and still crashing. All I know to do is to “roll back” to 6.0.

What a waste of my time. Why couldn’t Adobe have sent out an e-mail when the problem was discovered? Why wasn’t there an immediate rollback update sent out?

Now it’s my turn to apologize. It turns out that some other software was at least partially responsible for my system’s instability. I didn’t discover this until after going back to LR 6.1 but now I am afraid to try 6.2.1 again……..

As David Madison and Clicio, I was a also an user of the removed options and I’m trying to find my way without them.
The big mistake was to only see the numbers, not the actual users’ feedback. It doesn’t take rocket science to know that you don’t make a major change like this on a minor update of a established software, specially removing features.
Take Microsoft’s example: even tough the Windows 8 and 10 have almost all settings on their new interface, the old control panel is still there.
There’s nothing wrong in trying to improve the software, but there’s a lot of wrong in removing features. The outrage would be minimal if you just made the non-functional cosmetic change but keeping al features.
Please, at least add the missing options to the new panel. But the perfect thing would be to allow the old import panel back.

If Myer says so, then by George, it is true. I have tons of respect for this seasoned pro, who convinced me to take the CC path. And if Myer says you screwed up a great import interface, then you idiots at Adobe can take that for gospel.

I downloaded Capture One and it is currently working on importing my catalog of over 1M images. I’ll lose the Smart Collections, but gain a professional application in the process. To me, that’s damn well worth it.

Thank you for apology. For my part, the new interface is a step in the right direction. After spending 15 minutes exploring the new interface, my workflow (destination selection, presets, renaming) has remained exactly the same. Now choosing the folder destination for the imported files is the same as any other modern software (Office, etc.). Most tools are still there. Adding the missing tools would be appreciated in a future update.

The loupe preview could be restored in the single image view. The single image view in import is too buggy to be useful. When all images are selected for import, unselecting an image than moving to the next shows that new image unselected too. Moving to the next image then going back to the previous image shows it now as selected for import. Needs to be fixed to be useful. Can’t rely on the check marks under the images.

When I moved from Aperture, Lightroom reviews praised its editing tools but its interface was outdated. This new interface is a step in the right direction. Better communication and tutorials on how to use the new interface would have avoided many of the criticisms. For example, one comment below was to bring back the view where you have your source on the left, images grid for selection in the middle and tools on the right (renaming, presets, etc. ). Well, this is what I see every time I click on import now. Other comments ask Adobe to bring back features (file renaming preview as an other example) that are still there.

As a Lightroom 6 perpetual license holder, consistency would be appreciated. Do we get the new features or we don’t? We don’t get dehaze but get the new import interface? I would like to get all the new updates, not just a few selected ones.

Apologies are fine but action is what’s called for. Since the apology the silence from Adobe has been deafening.
I want to see Adobe PROMISE that ALL functionality is going to be restored and PROMISE that it will NEVER be removed on any future “upgrades”. If thy expect their customers to trust them with what, in many cases is the livelihood for many LR users, they should be absolute in their commitment to current customers rather than the populist appeal of the smart phone shooters. I’d also like to hear when they expect this problem to be fixed so I can decide if I’m going to waste more time and money with them or just move to Capture One and consider Adobe having become a company with no vision and who cannot be relied upon.

the entire run of LRCC has been of the poorest quality. I’ve been surprised at how bad the product has been and only wish I kept my last version of LR. It’s enough to make a guy hit up Capture One. I’ve come to expect better quality and performance from Adobe.

I am in the minority who prefer it, but definitely the settings should be available under advanced or so, and it should remember the settings.

Regarding the performance update. Maybe I’m crazy, but previewing and zooming into my Fuji raw files (RAF) seems to be a LOT faster. 3-5x. Can’t confirm the same for the Develop Module. I’ve tested before the update (thinking I updated), saw it took 3-5 seconds (yes all LR Settings optimized for performance), then realized it wasn’t installed as I had LR open, so updated, tested again, and takes like 1 second avg. Does anyone else notice an improvement with their files (guess it’s not for Fuji). I also restarted my PC, and was still the case.

Adobe, I have turned off all feedback options form all your programs as well as from windows and every other program where I can find this option. Most of my computer literate and security savy photographer friends has done the same.

Please do NOT assume that you know from your analytics show exactly waht your most loyal and experienced users are using. We do not want Adobe looking over our shoulders all the time.

Please reconsider deleting functions having to do with how we import photos into LR. We all have different needs and workflow systems. The experienced users will do things differently than the casual user. Please so not “dumb-down” the program.

Oh dear Adobe, what have you done? I wish I had read this before downloading. Bring back auto eject NOW please. Where has the file tree gone on the left hand side? Listen to your professional photographers please…..

An apology is always a good first step, but to be honest it really doesn’t mean much without the next step, which is asking “What can I do to make things right?”
My issue is a simple one. My workflow depends on the ability to view file names along with the thumbnail when I select which photos I want to import into Lightroom. Hovering over each of hundreds of photos one at a time in order to find that information is not acceptable.
I’m a CC user so I’m not aware of a way I can revert back to an older version.
In the near term, you have forced me to redesign my workflow. In the longer term, you may have also forced me to another software solution.

Dear Mr. Hogarty,
Your mentioned “very low usage features”. Do you mean the Eject card after import? This is a very useful feature every photographer who works with multiple cards or cameras uses. For all of us you’ve introduced a additional action and the chance to corrupt your card or to make the OS instable. Thanks a lot, not!
I was wondering to whom your team has spoken.
Get real and don’t mess with your professional users who embraced LR since 1.x to gain some newbies uploading their selfies.

Please bring back the old import window. I’ve been using Lightroom since version 2. One of the reasons I switched to Lightroom was the import window which featured automatic ejection of the memory card. That was a big deal back then and really helped my workflow. I’ve been taking it for granted for years now. WHY WOULD YOU REMOVE THIS SIMPLE FEATURE THAT I NEED ?!?!?!?!!??? I read today that Capture One can import Lightroom Catalogs. If Adobe continues to remove intelligent features and turn the program into some sort of touch screen toy, I will consider switching to Capture One.
Don’t remove features pros have been using for years. Bring back the old import window this week.

Danelle J says:
“Adobe, I have turned off all feedback options form all your programs as well as from windows and every other program where I can find this option. Most of my computer literate and security savy photographer friends has done the same.”

Good point, I do the same and all the professionals I know do the same, we distrust such feedback as it is often only used for marketing purposes. Possibly not in your case, maybe you genuinely collect user data and learn from it, but it has become a reflex default position to turn it off with many computer users. So I don’t think you are necessarily getting a representative section of the LR community that way. Had you done proper beta testing among professional users this whole sorry mess could have been avoided.

I have complained along with hundreds of others about the changes to LR Import. Here is an idea that will I think work for everyone. When teaching LR new students are a bit baffled by all of the options that appear before them. Changing the interface and removing functionality to dumb down the software is not the answer..
Here is my idea:
1. Revert back to the previous import. Once you understand it I heard very few complaints.
2. Develop a Wizard that walks a new user through the steps and briefly explains the options available at each step. After a user imports their photos a few times they will have the process down and can turn it off.

Tom I hope you read down this far and seriously consider proposing options that will both please your long time paying users and make the software accessible to new users.

Please, please, please listen to your users Adobe. The old import box was superb! I use all the features removed, especially the destination tree and eject after import. Removal of these features (and an obvious attempt to ‘dumb down’ Lightroom) had me off searching for alternative software (Capture One looks like it will fit the bill) – and this is from someone who teaches both Lightroom and Photoshop, so selecting a different product would have been unthinkable to me before this update!
If you must produce a dumb version for the masses – please develop a ‘Lightroom Elements’ version like you have with Photoshop, and leave the produce we know and love alone. Please.

I am a German so please forgive me my English.
Do you have a secret plan to oust your customers?
I just updated my LR on my Mac and than experienced this new import routine, which is everything but an understandable useful workflow. I WANT to copy data from folder a to folder b, Punkt. Which worked fine until yesterday. No everytime i dare to click on something, it starts earching and trying to find every image somewhere on my drives . SCRAP.
It took 12 Minutes to copy 45 24-MB-Imagefiles from a SD-Card to my NAS-drive, and than after restarting Lightroom: Adding to the catalog failed. So importing again which took me ten minutes(really) to click and WAIT through the two !! Subfolders on my NAS.
Did you ever read the ISO 9241-11? Its seams to me: no.
THE SD-Card-NON-Functionality has been discussed enough ; I dont understand why you have removed this function.
And still: did you ever here something about ntworks? I want to work on my catalogue on an network drive. This is standard technology today. Punkt.

Thanks for the apology. I most miss the auto-eject card and the ability to save the destination folder as a default and in a preset (seems now I have to pick my folder every time?). Also, the ability to review photos by destination folder (i.e. date) before importing.

I do appreciate the availability of a simplified import dialog, as long as defaults (e.g. destination folder) can be set/saved. But I don’t understand the logic of removing features that are useful to pros in an attempt to simplify for newbies. It’s a challenge in software design to simplify the interface while retaining functionality, but I think you guys are up to the task. In this particular instance, you could do something as simple as having two import dialogs, the “easy import” and the “advanced import”.

As a Lightroom paying customer since day one, allow me to express my disappointment with the entire V6 release cycle. Your firm, and your supporters at KelbyOne for example, made many comments about performance improvements and increased functionality in the original release. The majority of customers who use Lightroom in the course of their business will openly tell you that this was not true. The HDR and Pano functions are decent enough but will appeal to beginners and new users, not to seasoned professionals or serious amateurs.

Then came the first update. Big storm about DeHaze. As an educator I have found that I have to spend a lot of time with my clients helping them understand what it is doing and why they are unhappy with the results. Another beginner feature more fitting for Instagram than a professional digital asset manager and editing platform.

Then came the latest smoking hole in the ground. Shipping a product with a known bug is a difficult business decision and while you may not reply, I suspect that the release was a push from somewhere in the company to have something new to coincide with AdobeMAX. I’ve been in software a long time, and have seen this before. If it happened, I feel for you and your team, because it meant something had to give to meet the ship date, in this case it was QA. I am glad to see a fix for clients impacted in short order, but thousands of angry clients would not exist if the company had held the release until the bug was addressed. Because the primary fix arrived so quickly, it’s apparent that the engineers were very close.

On the subject of the Import dialogue, I, like many other respondents depend on Lightroom. I do not want nor need an Import dialogue that looks like iPhoto circa 2009. I use the functions that were presented to me. I understand the need to get new users. As an Educator, I know that the standard Import screen can be confusing to new users. So offer Basic or Advanced as a choice, if you believe that the import screen is a show stopper but do not rob those who have supported the firm for years in the hope of getting new buyers. It’s a bad decision.

Also please be aware that most pros disable the phone home junk, and even more use tools to prevent the invisible phone home events that some manufacturers build into their software. This should not be a surprise to you, so making decisions solely on in application analytics that require phone home to work is misleading to you and your teams. There are lots of good people who have posted who have an investment in Lightroom and its use. Why not ask us directly for input instead of making decisions without us?

You have to do what you have to do, but I am stunned and saddened to listen to peers who are actively looking for alternatives and who claim to have given up, having stayed on 5.7.1 and who see no future for their needs with Lightroom.

Maybe we’ve all got the wrong end of the stick. Maybe this is not the beginning of a dumbing down process, and the intention always was to put the currently missing import features back under an advanced tab, but they had to rush out an update under exceptional circumstances and didn’t have the time. In which case, a promise to have these features back, because their absence is hurting people, would go some way towards quelling unrest.

I appreciate the apology – but still – please commit to FIXING the import. Frankly the only thing that made sense to me when I was learning Lightroom at the beginning was the import. Now I simply don’t know what you’re doing with my files, I have to assume you’re doing about the same thing it did before, but I don’t KNOW like I used to. Also, bring back eject after import – I used it constantly and just now as I’m importing files from 3 different cameras I’m frustrated that I now have to remember to go outside of Lightroom to before swapping cards. This is ridiculously stupid. Hoping you fix it soon, or I may just downgrade and drop CC in favor of stand alone or a competing product. If this is progress I’m not interested.

It frustrates me to no end when software people remove features because they believe that it’s what people want. Why would they get rid of the “eject after import” which was tremendously useful?? Lightroom is for professionals; if people can’t figure out how to use it, perhaps they shouldn’t even be using a computer. This should have remained a toggle switch at the very least. The other changes are terrible too including copy only instead of move. Adobe: Please admit your mistake and restore the former import wizard. If you need to, add in a “moron” setting so that people can use the 6.2 version if they are unable to figure out the full version.

I teach Lightroom and many students still use older versions of Lightroom. With the changes to import, it makes teaching significantly harder. Definitely, less motivated to offer that class in the future.

I used the effect card after import feature all the time. Bring it back.

I have tried to use lightroom, to me the interface from day one has been to hard to use. I always go back to bridge and photoshop. This is also not the first update to Lightroom that has crashed my system. I think a redo of Lightroom from top to bottom is something you should consider. It has got to be more user friendly.

The “selfie crowd” (and the reference is not meant derogatory, it’s just a specific target audience) wants basic features and ease of use. A lot of programmers can code such apps, resulting in an abundance of basic photo apps of which most are free or available for a symbolic price.

The ‘intellectual value’ is in the knowledge of how to make advanced tools that can handle requirements requested by professionals. That’s why real photographers and prosumers don’t mind paying for their tools. They know the tools are not easy to make and expect the tools to be professional too.

In comes Adobe with the brilliant idea of dumbing down a professional tool for the selfie crowd (who doesn’t want to pay for it) and make the professional users (who don’t want it anymore) pay for it. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant…

Just like the marketing campaign for vacuum cleaners by Electrolux in the 60s (“Nothing sucks like an Electrolux”), I can imagine the “Adobe way” becomes a use case in business schools on how NOT to do it.

1. The import dialogue needs more not less features.
a. Option to select raw, jpg or both.
b. Option to import by date range.

2. If you are really interested in your customers you would not continue to ignore the most popular feature requests on your own forums. What happened to “Let’s do it” and the promises of a “CC” model.

3. I assume the “committee” responsible for this import decision shares the same dna as the committee responsible for the key design features of the crippled book module, locked into a Blurb model and dumbed down to a template based excuse for a book module.

4. Adobe does not have the right to decide what I should include or exclude from my Catelog.

5. I suspect the removal of existing features in the manner just experienced could be open to legal challenge.

6. Fresh scars on top of older scars take an awful long time to heal. This is not the first time that ‘trust’ has been broken. The pattern reeks of both arrogance and incompetence, endemic within Adobe.

Finally and most importantly, I am taking active steps to make myself as independent of Adobe as I can. Thanks for the push

Today I got the update…. I read before that the last update was awful. First time I called the Import Dialog I was frightended – because I saw some nude pictures from my personal folder…. I don’t want to think about, how this imagine to a customer who sit beside me, after taking some pictures for application for a new job.
I don’t know, who you are asking about the Import Dialog of Adobe Lightroom. It seems, that you don’t ask professionals. Perhaps, you got in the moment some extra money, if you make the Import Dialog more comfortable for amateurs…. But you forgot there one thing: Amateurs don’t use a software because it’s user friendly. They use a software, because professionals use it… If you go this stupid way forward to develope Lightroom in direction as a toy, you will lose the professionals and some time later also the amateurs….

I’ve been following this all week – since the first updates were released on Monday – and I’ve installed all of them. I count myself fortunate that LR is not crashing on either my Yosemite or El Cap systems – and I have been working them and test cases all week to be sure. This probably indicates that many of these issues are the result of software conflicts that would have been revealed with more thorough beta testing…and I just don’t have those conflicts.

Nonetheless I too am very disappointed in the removal of the old IMPORT dialog (not that it wasn’t without it’s problems) – but the new one is a User-Interface disaster. The options are hidden and have to be revealed, the checkmarks obscure the image, selecting/de-selecting is cumbersome; Auto-eject is no longer an optios. And this has been re-iterated by the hundreds of post before me so I won’t belabour it.

Tom, your apology only retains sincerity if you followup by rolling the removed features back.

Here’s what I would advise.
1. Re-instate the old dialog; enable it with a PREFERENCE
2. Implement an IMPORT WIZARD, as John Blackwood has suggested – excellent idea.
3. Ignore the analytics – I’ve turned mine off too.

But if you read your LR Forum – and I do each week – you will see that hardly no one there is complaining about IMPORT. What there are are countless occurrences of people losing photos by ‘de-linking’; lost folders; an inability to move photos/catalogs from one computer (like an older one being replaced) to a newer one; people with ‘corruption disasters’ and so forth; and things hidden in the user interface all over the place so you have to click-around to find things and you can never remember where they are as they are ALL NOT referenced in the dropdown menu structure. It’s so painful to read! The whole paradigm of how LR is organized and how it works is probably your biggest user issue – and you could well spend time on fixing that through education and wizards so all that confusion and pain goes away – and leave the facility that works alone.

Finally, one specific issue about the IMPORT user-interface you could fix, that no one has mentioned deals with PRESETS. When you set one up for a new user, with options set that would work for that user, you can’t just simply use it because it embeds the destination folder – and the IMPORT then, by default, goes to an un-expected place. Setting up a working default requires clicking the IMPORT button in Library; setting all the options in IMPORT the way you want and then completing the IMPORT within Import by clicking on it’s IMPORT button….now you have set the options and they will default to that next time (so a PRESET isn’t necessary) – but this is soooooo easy to break – so it’s not reliable. That’s the sort of thing you need to address in IMPORT.

Finally, for some time I have done imports by starting in Library, always showing my Parent folder, and clicking on the parent folder in the folder tree, doing a “Create folder inside…”, followed by selecting that (new empty folder) and doing a right-click “Import to this folder …” That still works in the new system, fortunately, and is a workaround until the loss of the display of the Destination tree is resolved.

So, please address these issues quickly.
I apologize if this is a duplicate – I am having difficulty posting it.

Hi Tom,
We all appreciate the apology. What concerns us is the process by which something like this could happen. The two issues here are pretty fundamental, and really out of character for most of our experience with LR.

First, removing features is not an upgrade. Example — eject after import. Why take that away? There are many others, but the idea is the same. Less is not more.

Second, how could you have missed the crashes? The most popular photographers platform is Mac, which seems to be where the crashes happen. It was so common that we wonder how you could have missed it, as we would expect your testing to be much tougher than any of our normal usage.

Please take your time here. Your product is not some game or novelty. It is a production tool many of use to earn a living. Deadlines are getting tougher. Throwing a stick in the spokes like this can lose us clients. No one needed 6.2 that bad, except maybe your management. So, take you time. Get it right. Stuff like this kills companies.

I uploaded and installed Lightroom firmware 6.2.1 and now I am completely unable to import files. I can see folders already imported and worked on but cannot import new files and folders. Camera used is the Leica S type 007.
Is there any way in which I can delete this upgrade to return to where I was?

Thank $deity I had a copy of LR5 on my laptop this last weekend. I was on a field trip many hours from any resemblance of usable bandwidth and went to import photos into LR CC to have the application crash, every single time. Adding photos from an existing location worked, but then the application crashed if you wanted to export them.

The new import dialogue’s lack of a move option is an issue (I use that often) as well as ejecting on import. To make such major changes with essentially no notice is irresponsible in the least.

I always use the auto eject of the card. And I move photos and use the directory tree to import photos to different folders in my directory. Why would you delete these items?!

I’m still ticked that I bought LR6 and then you stuck Dehaze on CC and won’t provide it to us 6 users in an update. It really has turned me against Adobe. Up until this spring I raved about LR to everyone. No more. Phooey. You just want your dollars apparently. And yes, I’m a big user (having taken over well over 150, 00 photos in the last four years – but my eye is out now for other editing options.
Michele

I had to completely uninstall LR CC after I updated. OMG>..what a mess. Now to import off my external hard drive the import window is EVERY SINGLE IMAGE on my hard drive and that’s thousands. Even if I click on a specific file or sub-file ALL images are in the import window. None of the files are in sync.

It took me HOURS today to find the images I needed to send to an editor today when it should have taken me 5 minutes. I finally uninstalled CC and downloaded my stand alone version that I WONT upgrade since it’s going to do the same thing. Now, I don’t have “dehaze” and a few other features that I like.

This recent level of communication of an apology seems similar to me as the pattern of a failure to understand the end users (purchasers) and customers of this product. Very much an arbitrary dictate as opposed to a POSITIVE level of interaction.

Examples: THE Forced change of the SUBSCRIPTION model of Photoshop
The issue of the ‘dehaze’ brush
Now the ‘dumbing’ down of the import process and the elimination of user configuration.

What next Adobe? Whatever it will be will fall into the category of being arrogant. Many great companies in the USA have failed to recognize that their OWN ARROGANCE has led to customers eventually leaving for other option. Wake up.

Again, where was the preview on Adobe Labs?(where all of these criticisms would have happened a lot less vituperatively)
I think I am only going to happy when Apple iPhone is removed as a ‘camera’ in LR- or installed as a camera in LR4D. That’s where all the newbies are coming from…
And don’t get me wrong, I totally love Apple (crossing fingers)
I especially love the way they update software, add and remove features based on ‘user’ input. Oh, that’s what ADOBE just did….
Any way, note to self: We have got to find that ‘user’ and stop him.
Al Hamilton LR3-4-5/PS6 ACE.

“we removed some of our very low usage features to further reduce complexity”
Just a heads up, your software is relied upon by professionals to do their jobs. You DO NOT remove features, or knowingly release software with bugs in in without notice or peoples work will be effected and people will not rely on your software again.

I’m one of them, this is absolutely unacceptable behavior for a professional software provider.

Has anyone has a problem with the lens correction panel? In the past there was a scroll down menu of lenses to select from. this seems to be gone from the latest update. After I select a lens brand, the lens correction feature keeps selecting an incorrect lens model and profile by that manufacturer.

This “upgrade” is for sure the worst one i ewer experienced.
The new import module is a big step in the wrong direction.
Not being able to see exactly where my photos will be in my folder structure causes me a lot of extra work.
The same thing goes for the lack of “move photos”.
Something i use more than 90% of the time.
I have used LR for 8 years now. At this moment I’m really close going elsewhere.
In total my confidence for Adobe is absolutely rock bottom.
To bad i can´t cancel my subscription of the full Adobe CC until July next year.

Please give me back the old import module ASAP.
And then do some serious work to improve performance, so that i can speed up my workflow. That´s really important to me.
Pro sports photographer, working for a wired agency. So each second does matter to me.
The new import truly costs me a lot of valuable time.

I´m truly really upset at this moment.
And it seems that I’m far from alone.

Tom Hogarty,
If you really want to earn back the trust of your customers can I suggest
1. Let customers vote on what they would like in new features, and don’t let Adobe staff have a vote
2. Maintain a public list of all bugs, allow customers to indicate the impact of each bug, and fix at least the top 95% of all outstanding bugs when shipping any Lr update.
A lot of people are watching to see if you are serious about doing better, or if this is just a PR stunt.

Jeffrey —
Implicit in David’s list is the expectation that Adobe will act on the user-created feature requests in #1 before adding “improvements” that no one wanted. And I think you missed the crucial part of #2: “and fix at least the top 95% of all outstanding bugs when shipping any Lr update.” That is not currently happening.

Jeffrey,
My experience of feedback.photoshop.com is much closer to a black hole – suggestions and bug reports go in, and disappear forever. As one example of many current issues I have: slide shows have been unusable for me since the initial Lr 6/CC release. I have see other people’s reports of the same issue along with more input confirming that it is a general problem. But slide shows still do not work.

If you believe that feedback.photoshop.com is providing this function, where is all the feedback asking for useful functions to be removed from Import?

I commented earlier today, but as I continue to think about this fiasco I have come to the conclusion that Adobe has no respect for the abilities and intelligence of most of your users. “Dumbing-down” your program shows that you have no respect for your loyal users.
If you must, offer a separate “Lightroom Elements” program for beginners where you can have “guided” steps for those who choose not to learn how to use the “grown-up” program.
But respect all of us who have spent the time and effort to learn how to effectively and efficiently use Lightroom to process our prized photos. BRING BACK OUR OPTIONS AND GIVE US BACK THE ABILITY TO MAKE DECISIONS FOR OURSELVES.
We all can find another program to use if this continues.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, please don’t remove features from Lightroom! I seriously love Lightroom and you’re making me want to cry. Importing is SO cryptic now. Everything was perfect before. All info laid out in front of you, nothing hidden. Don’t pander to software dummies. People shy away from Apple software and towards Adobe because Adobe creates professional software for professionals. Please don’t lose focus on pro users.

Lightroom 6.2 for Dummies? Some people think Adobe have dumbed down the interface for file import of Lightroom 6.2 to the point that ONLY dummies can use it. But that’s not true. Dummies much prefer that little app on the phone that adds the nice photo frame, so even they don’t use Lightroom 6.2. So, Adobe, NOBODY likes 6.2. Please do more than apologise for this poorly thought out release, withdraw it and reissue a 6.3 quickly with the restored file interface. By all means add a “input for dummies” button, but honestly I don’t know anybody who would use it! Meanwhile, my advice to everyone – DON’T UPDATE TO LIGHTROOM 6.2

I appreciate the work the Lightroom makes in improving your product. But I think the changes made to the import process weren’t well thought out or researched. The user interface is so dark its difficult to read. The lack of ability to automatically eject the memory card is a seriously nasty decision that makes my life more difficult.

I get the feeling you dumbed-down the interface far more than you needed to, taking away feed-back features (where, exactly, are my images going to be placed?), and taken away control I really need. This isn’t an application for an iPad or an iPhone – it’s for a full-blown computer. It needs to respect the user.

Please revisit the Import process and give us back the features we have used. Respect your users.

Have you ever heard the term, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it? But you all decide, hey we are going to completely redesign the import, for no apparent good reason, just to do it. Your apology is worthless because this wasn’t a oops we made a mistake. This was a conceded effort to deliver an inferior product. We are photographer’s who have paying clients who rely on options, even advanced options for our workflow to make things run smoothly. Whether you think some of the options are useful is irrelevant. You introduced the options within the import function of Lightroom and for years we have been using them, then you decide out of the wild blue we just don’t need the import function to have too many options because of a few new people who can’t seem to figure it out. Really? I mean what happened? Did you all forget you are Adobe? The king of options. That pretty much is what we love about Adobe. Is the fact that we have a slew of options to utilize if we need to. I mean why not turn Photoshop into Paint. Hell, look at Photoshop, tons and tons of features that some of us never use, but does that mean you just arbitrarily delete those because you are too lazy to update them when you put out a new release. And who says some functions even need updating. This whole thing is completely ludicrous and your half ass attempt at an apology is laughable to say the least. If you truly did care about your product you would have never released this ridiculous update. Besides the import issue itself, on a programming level it is extremely buggy and should have never been release on that alone.

The new import is a major disappointment.
I feel like it has been dumbed down and feels more like iPhoto than a professional piece of image editing software. I have been using Lightroom since version 3 and never once did I have a problem with the import process, even as a beginner.
Please, as others have suggested, create an option to switch from this basic version to a “pro version” of some sort.
This pro version should be exactly as it was before, from the look to the process of using it. Thank you.
Josh
(Hopefully not a future pro1 user.

Incremental updates are meant to refine and improve a product, not devolve it. LR, with the “bug fix” just crashed el Capitan so badly that it corrupted my external hard drive. Before that crash, after a wedding import, the image preview generations were so slow that flagging wouldn’t display the icons. Please allow your users to revert to a stable product. I’m completely stuck and seriously looking at CaptureOne.

I use Lightroom as a foundation in almost all the projects i do, effectively locking all my work in Adobes proprietary catalog-format. I wan’t to be ABSOLUTELY sure that the software I use professionally today, will be BETTER tomorrow. I used to think that about Lightroom, not any more.

To me Adobe needs to restore the faith that is creating software respectful of it’s professional user base. And the more I think about it, the more I realise that that faith won’t be restored, if Adobe now adds a checkbox for Eject after import. And maybe slowly over the next half year a little bit more of the functionality that the software has lost, and say “see we really care”. I will still fear that the underlying reasoning behind designing for the lowest denominator and “removing very low usage features” will seep through when Adobe starts updating the rest of Lightroom.

I need to see a radical decision from Adobe to show what direction they want to take Lightroom in the future, and a blog post like this does nothing. The only thing I can think of is, for now, to pull back the new “update”, restoring all the functionality that your professional users obviously depended upon. Only that will send a message that you really care about the feedback you get.
If you don’t, we will know what future you have chosen for Lightroom…

I agree with you that the old import process could be improved, and please keep working on a better solution it in your labs, and rerelease it when it is actually ready. But please don’t let us all beta test it while try to figure it out. Your current customers will respect you for it, and newcomers won’t know what they are missing for a few months.

If I don’t see decisive action from Adobe, personally I will start to look for alternatives.
A software like Capture One may not be perfect as it is, and I will probably miss some features from Lightroom, it really is a great software. But at least I have faith that they respect their users and will make the software BETTER tomorrow than it is today. And that means a lot to me.

Having update, again, and believed the crashing and bugs were fixed, I’ve just attempted to upload some images from my hard drive and not only can I not upload nor find the uploads – my entire library has disappeared. THOUSANDS of images just evaporated and a deadline looming and no time for faffing around with retrieving from external hard drives.

The previous import process was clunky, but it worked, and at least it didn’t magic my work into the ether. I’m feeling pretty ill right now. An apology isn’t enough, a working product is what is needed.

I am running a MacBook Air (11-inch, Mid 2011) with Lightroom 6.2.1 and it is a disaster. Lightroom goes into a mode where it uses about 90% of the CPU. As of yet I have not been able to import any files into a catalog. It takes ages to even open, if it opens at all, the new Import widget. I don’t know if any new versio of Lightroom has previously been so buggy as this version is and I am a long time Lightroom user.

Hi Tom,
Thanks for the apology. Yes, the import is a mess, and you should go back to the original format. That said, my biggest hang up is the stability or lack of in LR-CC and previous releases. Since version 4, I have not been able to use my adjustment tool using my Wacom tablet. I’ve upgraded my Wacom tablet driver with no success. Other issue are quirky sliders (moving erratic). Therefore, I’ve pretty much have deep 6 LR, and now use PS-CC and ACR for my editing. ACR works just fine with my Wacom Tablet and the sliders move smoothly. Also, LR-CC is sooo Slow at start up and constantly reloading my files, wasting my time!

When I went to import files and the new interface came up, I actually gasped out loud. My first words were “OMG, Fisher Price is now doing the UI for Adobe.” (Actually said something much less repeatable than OMG…)

And then I proceeded to fumble and stumble around trying to import my files, when I should have been tagging and editing to get them out to the customer.

Simple and clean doesn’t mean dumbed down. My problem with Lightroom isn’t complexity of UI – it’s that the UI sometimes has a mind of its own, and the program exhibits all kinds of weird behaviors that speak to poor coding and testing. Like how images twitch on the screen when you open some editing controls on my 2 year old Macbook Pro Retina with max memory… if you can’t run fast and reliably on that, you need to go back to coding school.

Making that many decisions about defaults is like saying, we’re going to remove all the exposure modes from your camera except P, because we know better than you how to take pictures. And, if you still want to shoot Aperture mode, you fossil, you can go into the menus and make it so that even though the command dial says P, it’ll be Aperture mode… unless we change our minds about it.

Really? There is no longer the “option” to eject the card after import? Why would you remove this option? Give us the choice please. I found it convenient, and more importantly, if I got an error message when I pulled the card, I knew something may not have gone correctly on the import.

This new version of LR is awful. It keeps locking up on me. And I ditto the above comments about the import function being ruined. I use auto eject on my memory cards all the time. I also used the file rename function. I don’t see that anymore. I don’t get it…if people can’t figure out the import function then how do you expect them to use the develop module? It’s alot more involved. Are you gonna dumb that down too & make it useless??? Is the the beginning of the end of LR? Can I go back to an older version of LR before you screwed it up???

Apologies are welcome, but this one isn’t satisfactory. Here’s why: “At the same time we removed some of our very low usage features to further reduce complexity and improve quality”. Keyword: “REMOVED”. I’m paying monthly for something I find useful, only to find one fine day that it’s not there anymore. This time it was taking control of the folder structure on import; what will go missing next? Truth is, Adobe will still consider future release as just “releases” – as opposed to “upgrades”. I don’t see myself using LR for long if they don’t change route clearly.

Please bring back the previous and very useful import process as a selection. The dumbed down import process is ineffective and inefficient as compared to the current system. Please make it go away or provide a way to revert back to the old process and all its controls.

I haven’t run the update yet, but…completely removing eject on import because your metrics say it’s a low usage feature. What is wrong with you people? I’ve worked in the software industry long enough to know that you don’t break backwards compatibility for your customers unless there’s really no alternative.

Sorry Tom , the product I pay to run isn’t called “meaculpa”, it’s called “Lightroom” – now FIX IT ! 😉

No on one in their right mind p*s off their existing userbase with the type of releases which have typified the 6.x cycle thus far. Graphic card acceleration releases – fail. This new import – fail. Really bad speed… fix the previews speed issues so people don’t have to use PM… Why didn’t you just build a simplified import interface, leave the old one available and let the users select in Preferences between them ?

What’s with the big tick over photos on the import screen? I don’t format my card after every import and I don’t import all photos from a shoot so being able to preview the photos without a stupid big tick on them allowed me to uncheck the photos I didn’t want quite quickly. Also removing the folder tree has made importing more difficult. As a real estate photographer I can have several houses on a card from a days shooting and could easily select the appropriate house and destination folder then import 1 house shoot at a time. This new UI and those stupid bloody ticks have made my whole import process unnecessarily more time consuming and difficult.

The is a lot of power and functionality in Lightroom and this of course means complexity and all that entails.

Perhaps its best if future refinement of Lightroom be presented in a way that can be tailored by the user so that they can choose to be presented with a simplified or “complexified” dialog in much the same way that current games can be played in “easy”, “normal” and “hard”?

The underlying functionality and code would be the same for either interface (excepting that the simplified would cut some of those options off)

I’ve been very disappointed with Adobe moving to a Software Rental Model. I’m still on 5.7 and will be until the RAW converter fails me, then it will be time to move to a different product.
Adobe – People want stability in the products they use. Lightroom should move slowly, cautiously and with purpose not just so everyone feels like the money they pay each month is worth something.

Apologies are fine, but no one has directly addressed customers’ concerns about the loss of functionality and the usability of the Import module. What’s Adobe’s plan moving forward regarding Lightroom? I think that’s what customers are waiting to hear.

I appreciate the appology; however, I am VERY concerned about your comments on the import changes.
Your statements imply that you still believe these changes are the right move. They are NOT. You have taken away many very imortant features. YOU may call them “rarely used” but that is not excuss to remove valuable features for those who do. People who don’t wish to use them don’t have to, but don’t take them away.

Just let users choose an interface they prefer within Options. It’s that simple. “simple import or adv. import”.. see how easy that was?

Adobe MUST stop making changes based on the ideas of non users. If you simply read your own comment forums you’ll see that the vast majority of people do not like or want this change.

Your apology accounts for nothing as they are meaningless words. I believe, as do most others, that your comments about the Import program are somewhat less than the truth.. It they are not then at the very least you should open an independent poll accessible to all. You might get a shock. If you are proven right, I for one, will cancel my subscription, as I would consider that you are changing a classic into a silly consumer product.

As I cannot afford to lose my income I have reverted for the time being and will re-asses whether I should continue with Lightroom. I as many others will be voting with my custom as well as public media – maybe somebody might explain the gravity of what you’ve done.

I agree with many here. I pay a subscription fee for PS and LR. I pay it because I know what I am paying for – I have subscribed once I reviewed the trial and decided the feature set is what I need. Now that I have subscribed, moved all my 200000 photos to your system, meticulously catalogued them and basically locked myself in to your products, you take away major features in an update release?

How would you feel if you buy a shiny new Mercedes SL55 then 1 year down the line you take it in for its service, only to have it returned without the passenger seat – reason being cited is that it reduces maintenance by not having two seats. You would be furious!

I really do need to view and select my import destination folders. It appears that Lightroom defaults to the last parent folder used.
Why is it even an issue not to leave the card auto eject?
If I am using the “Add” feature, I am perfectly capable of selecting the correct folder and do not need the program to scan the whole drive.
I cannot update until at least the first issue is restored.

Having worked as a software product manager for several Software firms including IBM your replies remind me of responses from my developers who felt that only they knew what was good for the end user. While some of the import functions may not be used as much or often as others they play an important role in many photographers workflows in certain situations and now when needed .. poof not there. The import move function may not get used that often as I only use the add function for my CF and SD cards but I use move quite a bit when moving photos from disparate Hard drives, CD, DVDS etc and trying to consolidate data or to cherry pick a particular photo from a device. You need to stop going down this road that you are going down to “make it simpler to use” . If you want to make a dummies version of Lightroom make it a separate Elements like product. You are alienating a huge population and you aren’t listening. Wake up.

I am really worried. 3 or 4 days and over 400 negative comments from professionals since the apology on this blog alone, and still no word about when the import features will be put back. So many of the comments say the same thing: we paid for a product that did certain things, base our busy workflows around them, and you arbitrarily remove them!

I am the last to want to “break someone’s bread bowl” but surely heads must roll at Adobe unless the apology becomes more than words and translates into action. I am not expecting the missing features to be put back tomorrow, I just want a categorical assurance that they will be put back, and sooner rather than later.

Okay, you are sorry. So am I!!!!!! Now, I can be okay with the new layout although I do not like it and I can see where the totally new screen is easier for novice users but why make the rest of us suffer. As you gave us the ability to click the “Settings Gear” icon to see the rest, why not give us back all the prior functionality. Now, I have to eject each card manually, one at a time? Now I cannot select multiple cards? Now the prior keywords do not pop up during import mode? Are you guys really serious? Okay, add a new “Easy Import” – All of us will be okay with it as long as we do not have to use it and as long as you do not remove the powerful functionality that keeps all of us PAYING for this product.

I’ve been a huge supporter of Lightroom since the first version, encouraging many photographers to see the beauty of the tool.

However, now I am completely stunned by this “upgrade”. I hated going to the subscription model, but now when I lose functionality I’ve grown to rely on, I am really ticked off.

I remember back when you said Lightroom was created by photographers for photographers. What happened here? Look at all these comments!

According to CNET: “Adobe has made it clear it won’t step back from the simplified photo-import process. “Customers were universally unable to decipher the Import dialog without getting frustrated,” Sharad Mangalick, Adobe’s senior product manager for digital imaging, said in a blog post.”

WHY dig in your heels when so many of us really treasure the product? Or what it was at least.

If you must have a simple format, make that an option or a wizard or another basic product. Time to move past the apology and make it right for your customers.

Incredibly disappointed in the dumbing-down of the Import dialog in the latest release.

While I understand the desire to appeal to a wider audience, please don’t punish experienced users by removing useful features in the name of “simplicity.”

You can still keep things simple in a default view and have the more advanced options hidden behind the gear icon.

Please bring back:
Destination folder tree preview. (Very useful to see exactly where files will go.)
Filename preview (Useful to see exactly how files will be named)
Move option (useful for reorganizing an existing set of images into dated folders)
Eject Card after import (very helpful when ingesting multiple cards)

Stop trying to turn Lightroom into Picasa! (Scanning of all folders, for example).

I am advising all of my students and clients to hold off on the latest update. Something I have NEVER had to do in the past.

This is a downgrade in no uncertain terms. The new import “experience” punishes existing users in the hopes of luring in new ones. It feels more like a marketing decision than a software engineering one.

So, pretty please, with sugar on top…give us back the basic functionality we have enjoyed for so long. You can keep your fancy new “Add Photos” dialog, just let the rest of us get back to work.

Please give me advice to downgrade LR via Cloud to the old import feature. I’ve tried but I cannot work professionally without the Auto-Eject-Card feature. I have to handle up to five SD-Cards and I need to switch them fast. I have no time to eject the cards manually. But my notebook forces me to do so because I can only switch two or three times without the eject. Afterwards the notebook doesn’t accept a new SD-card and I have to restart the operating system.

It is also very poor for my work that the 2-click-import is a 3- or 4-click-import now.

I really need to downgrade to a stable release. Otherwise I need to look out for another solution.

After trying both the upgrade released on Monday and the following “upgrade” later in the week, I’ve gone back to the previous version of LR CC. Even the latest “upgrade” version crashes on what used to be straightforward operations — like opening a LR catalog from an external drive!

The team has broken more than it fixed, or provided as enticements to upgrade. and I haven’t bothered to look at the new import feature; all the negative comments have dissuaded me. I was quite happy with the old way.

I miss the possibility to import from a source previously selected. I copy the photos from the card to the final position in the SSD and import into Lightroom from there. It’s a pain all the time to start from the root to navigate down tot he actual folder.
Am I missing something? (I had not ime to read the +400 comments above…)
Kind regards,

The new import is garbage. I have worked with Lr since the first release in 2006. Ps since 1990. It is work to learn Lr well but if I can learn it anyone can. I am slooowww. The new system looks just like that silly useless simple interface style, like an Intuit (Quicken, Turbo Tax ets.) program. Bring the old system back as an advanced option. Just because new users have a learning curve does not mean old users should be punished by dumbing it all down. Unless new $$$ is Adobe’s only concern. They hold all the cards now since the introduction of Creative (Cash) Cloud. Check marks covering the image I need to see to add or remove is beyond clueless. Also I do not want to look at a background photo in the first import screen. I am trying to focus on my own asset images when working on an import not any other work. I could go on. Capture One may be my new .raw manager if Adobe digs in their heels. I would cut loose Ps but I am stuck with it.

1. Bring back the destination tree.
2. Get rid of the horrid check marks.
3. Is the “Synchronize” fixed. I had to reimport my whole image collection.
4. In fact, let the user revert to the 6.1 import dialog.

Well, I am glad I was out of town teaching a workshop last week and teaching the old lightroom ways. From what I see right now I hope my CC subscription isn’t coming to an end. I don’t want a cute user interface I want one that works and one that flows (over 180,000 photos in my main catalog).

I will be waiting for the update that un does the update, or at least give us a prefrence setting
___ cute light room
___ Professional Lightroom

Who know maybe we would grow to love the cute Lightroom if we could turn if off when needed.

“Update October 12, 2015: With 432 comments and counting I just wanted to let folks know that I’m reading all of the feedback and the team will provide an update this week.”

Personally, I hope we’re going to hear that all functions will be restored and a guarantee that they will remain part of the software. Some simpleton in marketing disregarded and disrespected the customer base as a whole and those professional photographers and their customers who rely on Lightroom in particular. Anything short of that will certainly cause me to abandon Adobe in the same way they have abandoned so many of their customers.

Scratching my head on this update guys… I can understand the bugs–software is complicated and bugs happen. But, I really can’t understand the thinking behind removing the features you did or bolting on an entirely different looking and feeling interface to an otherwise polished and coherent product. Is this the result of a new leader or a new team? Should I expect years of half baked interface changes and feature subtractions ahead?

Please, accept this was a bad experiment and just put it back the way it was. Still time to make this right. Or, would you like to lose most of your installed base like MS did with Windows 8?

I must agree with Tom that changes were desperately needed to the import process; the dialogue was far too confusing for new users. But the designers have chosen the wrong type of simplicity – hiding the complex stuff instead of clarifying it.
Importing and organising IS complex with a choice of file formats, locations, backup locations, when to eject and how to format etc. and no single right way to do it for everyone. The old dialogue smacked new users with having to learn half of a DAM process before they could understand what each option could possibly be FOR, let alone make good choices in the dialogue. The dialogue needs to explain and CLARIFY this unavoidable complexity, so that each user can do it they way they want. Taking away clear, easy-to-understand choices like “move” and “eject” makes it harder for experienced and new users alike, not simpler.
Trainers have a saying that there’s a cheap simplicity on the “near” side of complexity, and a very different simplicity on the “far” side of complexity. It’s the one of the far side that we want! I’m hoping the team get the right simplicity to let everyone import how they want, and also expand the LR user base – that will benefit us all.

Over the last several years, I’ve been teaching hundreds of students Lightroom through community colleges camera stores, and other venues. I have not found one student who couldn’t understand the import dialog box. In fact, many of them have used options no longer available, like the move tool to transform the mess of their file collection, into an orderly folder structure by being able to see where their files will land after import in the directory tree. But that is no more, since you removed this feature, and a few others.

The new import dialog box looks like something designed by Fisher-Price. And what’s the story with the checkmarks on the photos? Does that mean you like that or you don’t? It’s not obvious, clearly a design flaw.

The problem lies not with the import dialog box, which is been around for the last eight years, but in Adobe’s inability to clearly convey how to use their products. The previous import was clear: where are the images, what you want to do with them, where should it go? It couldn’t be more clear. Anybody who doesn’t understand this basic concept is not ready to import their images into Lightroom. If you want to dumb down the program, then come out with an Adobe Lightroom Elements.. You cannibalized a program that professionals depend on with the intention of taking a shortcut toward increasing your market share at the expense of those of us that have supported and promoted your program for years and years.

I was so excited with Lightroom, that I even made my own Lightroom baseball hat. With what you’ve changed and how you’ve changed it without soliciting imput is an embarrassment and makes me ashamed to be associated with the program. As others have said, they subscribed to the creative cloud program expecting one program with certain features, only to have it mauled in a dark alley by the developers and marketing staff.

It’s experiences like this that discourage me from recommending my students convert their files to the DNG format, and also encourages them to write changes to XMP sidecar files, so that if Adobe to kneecap us, it will be easier to migrate to another program.

We aren’t asking for anything new: just for you to honor peoples’ request to restore what was previously in the program, and not blindside us for the sake of your profit.

The piling on Tom is unfortunate but incorrect electronic feedback morphing into LR changes were made
at the expense of Adobe LR customer base. I would be very surprised if Adobe does not
do the right thing considering what is at stake.

As a side note and not a cheap shot but is anybody at Adobe a photographer ?

I have got jobs pending that I cannot do without LR. If you don’t fix it by tomorrow, I will be migrating everything to another program so I can get my work done!! I can’t even get LR to open now. I’m up late working and extremely frustrated. I hope you are, too!

Please don’t copy everything Apple does. They get by because they have hardware. You are a software company mainly for professional. You can’t sell subscriptions to consumers because they will use other free options.

Focus on professional and build consumer software separately. Without us, you guys are nothing.

If anyone finds the original import too difficult, they sure can’t use the rest of the program. How changing the import function alone would bring in new customers? It is a solution looking for problem. Make the program runs faster and more people will come

Let me add my voice to the above; I’ve been a LR user for a number of years. I use auto eject all the time, I LOVE “Move” as a feature, and I hate that “dehaze” is left out of my user experience simply because I’m not buying into the Creative Cloud kool-aid. I’ve started looking at other software (Zoner Photo Studio is looking halfway decent, as is ACDSee). I don’t mind a simpler interface as long as the fully featured one remains available, but if it doesn’t… Bye-bye LR.

The subscription plan says we get access to previous versions. As far as I can tell, the CC installer only offers the latest CC version and version 5. Version 5 had a different catalog format, we cannot just switch to it in the middle of working. If the installer gave us easy access to revert to any previous CC version, people could rescue their businesses by reverting to 6.1 while you work on our feedback.

I have been very busy lately and have been procrastinating upgrading from 6.1 to 6.2. Wow, am I fortunate not losing the Import features that I use all the time!
I’ve been a loyal Lightroom and Photoshop user since the beginning of LR and the early days of PS, paying for upgrades, and putting up with the quality issues — but always confident that Adobe would eventually get it right. This last move has eroded a lot of brand equity.

This is not an update! It is a downgrade. The “new” import dialogue has me totally trying to rethink my workflow with less than optimal results. This was just the sort of thing I worried about with the move to the “CC” model. My worst fears have been realized. My trust has been violated. I the next few days/weeks i will assess my continued use of this product and consider moving to alternates…… what you have done is unacceptable! When I leave I will not be back!

Is this push to simplify the import interface coming from a desire to attract consumers? The previous import UI was quite simple to use even if it wasn’t exactly pretty. Over the years, since the beta, I’ve noticed fluff features enter the software such as Books, Slideshow, Maps, Web which must have eaten up quite a bit of programming resources when professionals (I’ve run 600k+ images though LR) care about speed, tools and speed. Doesn’t LR report that these fluff features go unused? I personally spend 70% in Dev and 30% in Lib and 0% anywhere else. I have a 4790k quad CPU at almost 5GHz with a 4k monitor and LR is pretty unusable in the Develop module and, no, enabling my 280X GPU makes everything *worse*. It surprises me when new features/refinements are rolled out that completely do nothing for my workflow in a pro-focused app. Time is money and I’m spending a lot of money looking at a “Loading…” sign.

Yeah the new import dialog screen is atrocious. This is what happens when companies blindly follow metrics without knowing the stories behind the metrics. Also personally, I used auto-eject all the time (mac and PC) and often used move functionality, all very useful.

Amazingly, even from an interface design perspective, the import screen is a total failure.

Look at the interface during import, and then look at the REST of Lightroom! All the team did was disorient the users of Lightroom (new AND old) by making an interface totally foreign to the rest of the program!
Users are presented with nice left columns of file trees in the Library module, but during import all of that disappears. Wow.

Thankfully I’ve found the instructions to roll back to 6.1.1 Now I get to go through that joy and then reinstall all my plugins.

I have been developing software for almost 35 years.
I’ve made my mistakes. Been bashed about the head for them.
It’s unavoidable.
Yes, LR is complicated to use for beginners, but it’s a great tool once you understood it.
So removing those “power functions” from LR is obviously a step in the wrong direction.
Go back, rethink your decision. Do you real want to head into the direction of a consumer product for “point and shoot photographers”? I guess not. And I think these guys will go with easier (and cheaper) programs anyway.
All in all: Please stick to “LR is for photographers” — keep it the power tool it can be.

“Our customers, educators and research team have been clear on this topic: The import experience in Lightroom is daunting”.
Only if you are a F**king idiot with no clue about computers. However is this is your target market now , heaven help us..

Since you’re reading all these Tom (thanks!), I’ll throw in my two cents in support of POWER USER FUNCTIONALITY.

I’ve been using Macintosh since serial number 676 in 1984. And despite my Mac-bias, I bagged Aperture and I’ve been using Lightroom since the Antarctica release party in 2007. I’ve taught/trained a hundreds+ people on using LR.

Since you deprecated the awesome feature of “local” collection select status (in favor of “making it easier” to understand the program), the slide toward “Ease of Use” (which all to often ends up being simplification and ultimately “you can’t do xyz / anymore”) is disturbing.

As an ex-software developer/exec, I understand challenge of maintaining too many customization features over time. The seemingly easy answer is to “just make the old feature/function a preference” (that old/power users can turn on/off). But doing regression testing on n-options can snowball and make code maintenance difficult.

And, I understand you want to continue to grow your user base, and allow new users to come up to speed quickly/easily. HOWEVER, as they learn to use the program, and become more sophisticated users, confining them (and by definition your loyal base of “power users”) to a simplistic interface/set of options is very poor.

Similarly, “taking away” functions, especially power user functions, causes harm to your loyal users, because it interrupts and sometimes destroys established workflows, for individuals and across teams. Do no harm!

That’s the essence of a position held by me and many of my colleagues.

Thanks for asking/listening,
-c

PS. Since you’re reading these, how about another request for enhanced Metadata filters in grid view. Not giving access to key EXIF data such as Exposure Bias is very frustrating. MANY photographers exposure bracket routinely now. Having to do kludgey hacks to hide all but one of an exposure bracket series is a continual frustration, on EVERY shoot. It would be such a simple addition, and provide solid returns (and no, your metric software can’t track such a thing, because one has to go to plugins or external editors to work around it).

Tom
As a professional Lightroom trainer and author, I’d like to suggest that you reach out to those of us who work directly with those learning and using Lightroom. After 7 years of teaching LR, I can safely say taht I know what my 1000’s of students and clients want and need. Every day we trainer see (and hear) the frustrations of working “in the trenches” with real users.

I would also suggest focusing on the new features that users have been requesting since version 1 that have still not been added, rather than taking away features that we use every day. Just because the members of your team don’t use certain feature, that does not imply we don’t.

I would also highly recommend the accelerated development of the Lightroom Elements project so professional features can be added to the current versions while simplifying the Elements version. Everyone wins.

Again, you have an incredible collection of professionals who would love to work with your team to provide real-world feedback, ideas and new feature requests (preferably before the code is written, rather than after.) Please take advantage of those of us who have more than just personal experience using Lightroom.

Tom, feel free to contact me personally to further this conversation.
David Vanderlip

I would have expected Adobe to be in contact with someone like yourself as a matter of course.
Fully agree with the separate Elements LR idea if that is what they are trying to turn the existing LR into, which is what it looks like.
Ian

“Update October 12, 2015: With 432 comments and counting I just wanted to let folks know that I’m reading all of the feedback and the team will provide an update this week.” …

… thanks for the update! I gather it’s understandable that just the (laudable) apology alone w/o any actual announcements how to improve the new import screen for existing/advanced users was not enough. The previous clarification that there’s no going back, period, didn’t improve things either :-p

Sorry you had to get sh*tstorm’ed as accidents do happen. But imho it’s necessary to make Adobe recognize that relying on biased telemetry or just one profitable focus group isn’t the way to go. The whole CC suite profits from the “pro appeal”, and amateurs use it because pros do – even though there are less complicated and less expensive alternatives out there that are more adequate for sorting baby shots or auto-toning odd selfies.

OH and if the team is looking for a bit of LR that needs improving.; What about the Book module.. It’s truly horrible. What about drag n drop? There are a whole raft of improvements that could be made to every area of LR to make it better and easier to use.

I am still puzzled who on earth would think to get away with such an unmotivated and unnecessary feature removal from a pro tool with the reasoning to comfort first time users by massively dumbing down the media ingest. And, to add insult to injury, pack it up in a known buggy update which leaves the already shocked user base exposed to crashing bugs at no end. Wow, way to go Adobe… you better learn from the experience!

I understand one wants to simplify certain things in order to lure new customers. That’s okay. As a professional photographer and cameraman I understand this process. However, this process crosses a line when old, trusted and faithful customers feel betrayed and misunderstood.

Give us back our import screen. It was logical, it was thorough and it was clear after studying it for a couple of minutes. Yes it could be overwhelming, yes I understand your need to dumb down, but no…. you crossed that line. We, faithful customers, feel misunderstood and betrayed.

If you want this software to be a professional solution, than act like it is a professional piece of software. Dumb down where dumbing down is needed, smarten up where it is needed. And ooh, don’t forget, keep your hand of those parts that where clear but maybe a bit overwhelming.

And if you do change those bits, first test it with a Beta-version or give professionals the change to click on a advanced option that keeps all those much needed options.

So, dear Adobe, thanks for the apology, now it’s time to get back to work and reinstate that old import screen. I don’t care about a stupid bug, these happen and the service folk at adobe helped me get back on track within ten minutes. So, really, no time lost.

But stop wasting our time, and yours on a botched import screen that will make customers look out for other options!!!! (Hello Capture One!!!!)

Dear Tom Hogarty and team,
I’m also floored by Adobe’s arrogant attitude. I left my parents’ home some time ago and typically don’t need someone telling me what I need or not. Especially, since the only thing that REALLY NEEDS YOUR ATTENTION SHOULD BE SPEEDING UP the lame performance of Lightroom. Scrolling through the library feels like computer animation of the 1990s – even the entry level Photos app made by Apple (and I’m sure your looking down at such amateurish piece of software) is BLAZING fast by comparison. GO BACK DO YOUR HOMEWORK, STOP TREATING YOUR PAYING CUSTOMERS AS THOUGH THEY WERE KIDS WHO DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY NEED.
Cheers!

One more question:
Is it true that copying as DNG is no longer supported?
Why would that be? I’ve build my whole library on DNG! Did I make a mistake trusting in you to keep supporting your format?
This means I will have to add one manual step?
One some days I import several thousand Images in one go. Works ok in LRCC6.1 — will it keep working in 6.2?
Getting disappointed…

There is no more Copy AS DNG. There is an option to Convert TO DNG. I haven’t tried it so I don’t know for sure IF it makes just DNG files or Copies the originals and then Converts those to DNG making 2 files instead of only one as it did with Copy AS DNG.

For once 🙂 this is not a bug, but really a feature: Starting with LR6 the import as native raw renders previews much quicker, and the conversion to dng is done in the background afterwards. There might be some cases where you’d rather “copy AS dng” because it doesn’t read/write raw->dng on the same hd, but that’s probably low usage :->

CC Adobe: Now you’ve done it, when in doubt even useful changes are suspected to be total screw-ups :-\

I just looked again and it really seems they’ve only changed the “copy as dng” method to a “convert to dng” checkbox. But your fear might be well founded, and this feature might be next on the removal list (esp. as you can convert later on in any case)!

To check, sit your granny in front of LR and ask her to import some shots taken from her emergency mobile phone.Is she confused even by the new 6.2 import screen? Well, there you are, it’s probably due to the superfluous “convert to dng” option 🙂

This reminds me a bit of the DDOS attack flickr organized by themselves when they released their “auto-uploader” (including the nonsensical auto-tagger) that uploaded ALL IMAGES from the local machine (which resulted in a break down of the flickr Server farm).
They thought they should make it “as easy as possible” as well.
I left flickr then and switched to smugmug (and their wonderful lightroom plugin).

Btw.: flickr has decided to go back to having paying customers again… obviously all those mobile phone user just use up space but creat no added value. Who would have guessed 😉

“At the same time we removed some of our very low usage features to further reduce complexity and improve quality.”
Why do you think the features you removed aren’t used? I used the directory-tree every day. I need to see the destination and I also need to deselect some folders before import – not dozens of single images one by one to prevent them from being imported in that session.
Furthermore you reduced quality and improved complexity in the workflow, not vice versa.
If your goal for the future is simplicity over professional usability (visiting new users at home instead of present users at work), please communicate that clearly. Then I wont waste any more time on Lightroom and look for alternatives. I have been a happy user since version 1.0, but the current evolution is very disappointing!

Yes indeed. 659 comments and counting. Tom Hogarty needs to keep up with the complaints. And there are other forums, not to mention the other two (2) threads under Adobe Lightroom Journal. My count is over 2,000. And what will any marketing guy tell you? For every person who takes the time to complain, nine others do not. So Adobe has over 200,000 people who are NOT pleased.

I won’t rehash all the arguments and I’ve made some myself in the initial post that explained why Adobe felt it had to change the import dialog, but I do hope swift action follows. Looking forward to it!

I’m sure this point has been made in the previous comments but just in case it hasn’t…

When you chose to look down on Lr6 users by not giving them things like dehaze or local black/white sliders your excuse was that we bought an standalone product so we would not get new features, just bug fixes and new camera support…

So…you won’t give Lr6 users new features but you WILL take from them existing ones?! How do you justify that double thinking?!

Thanks for the note that you and the your team will get back to us later this week. Fully agree with all the comments above how removing features from LR is the wrong way to go, how getting real world input from experienced LR users would help in the future before major changes are made, and how Adobe should review there QC process to find software bugs before releasing updates. Hope Adobe listens to the comments and suggestions on this blog, learns from this, and works with the user community to fix the things in LR that need to be fixed, since at the end of the day we all want the best for LR.

One other thing I forgot to mention was that the recent update and removal of important features suggests Adobe is going in the direction of “dumbing down” LR with the goal of making it more consumer friendly. This is a concerning direction Adobe appears to be heading with LR. If you need to make a more consumer-friendly version, please consider either keeping the advanced settings for professional users in hidden panels (but allow customization in the preferences settings) or make a LR-elements version (like what is done with Photoshop. Please don’t make LR into a simplified “tablet-like” photo-editing software, but keep it the professional photo editing software that it should be.

*Knock on wood* … but it probably takes more than some blog replies to make Adobe re-think their strategy.

Just the other day they commented on LR 6.2 that the new direction is targeted at “people passionate about photography and who use their cameras as a creative outlet”, i.e. are not able to deal with a complex software interface. If Adobe isn’t ready to create a LR Elements, then by default the opinion of existing customers is meaningless vs. the huge bulk of the unexplored photography amateur market.

Will existing customers with long LR experience and catalogs really take the large hassle and jump to another software even if they’re annoyed? No. But will Adobe gain much more $$$ by selling more subscriptions, gaining the management more success bonuses? Yes. There you go.

Axel,
The statement “people passionate about photography and who use their cameras as a creative outlet” should maybe read ‘social networking children who want to push one button to be passionate and creative”.

I’ve been in this industry going on 35 years and currently do first level product testing and support for imaging plugins. A good part of my ‘support’ is telling people how to use Lightroom at it’s most basic functionality and even then most just don’t get it or actually just don’t want to take the time to learn the basics of an imaging workflow.

The social networking children communicate in broken sentences and become extremely confused if they see more than 1 or 2 sliders or buttons on a screen. They know little about the basics of photography and use Lightroom to ‘fix’ their lack of knowledge or to run plugins or presets that make them look like they know what they’re doing.

That, I think, is the kicker. Adobe has realized that the social networking children are a huge market and will start catering more and more to them….just look at the so called editing apps for phones and tablets that have miniscule control and no realistic workflow that have surfaced in the last few years. The children jump all over these things because they’re simple and so Adobe decides to ‘make it simple’ on the one side and
‘kill a pro workflow’ on the other. Does this possibly mean that the actual real working pro is becoming a thing of the past to be replaced by children with no skills that rely simply on technology?? So maybe the children of this industry is where Adobe pulled its analytics from because as you can see from the above, it sure wasn’t us ‘old’ guys/gals.
=John

Actually I hope you’re correct with your analysis and Adobe will agree once they’ve dug out of their heap of biased telemetry.

If LR for the new generation :-> isn’t compatible with an old-school LR for people who are willing to learn the app, then Adobe has no choice but to create a “LR Elements”. That means stopping dumbing down and stuffing all possible “big” features like hdr/pano/mobile/… into LR, they can concentrate to improve what LR was designed for in the first place.

Imagine what the “core” LR would have benefited by dev time would have been focused into implementing “little” requests by the existing users…

I do not want to be unconstructive but frankly I am scratching my head wondering about the added value of this update if any. All and I mean all features of the former import module were useful to me. In addition getting a bit old, I am reluctant ton consider change for the sake of change. Admittedly this may be idiosyncratic 😉

This is the culmination of what we, the naysayers of the subscription method, feared would happen. We stated that Adobe would no longer feel the necessity to get things right. They don’t need to! We sit here frustrated about things that we use, things that we are used to, that are now broken, or completely removed, yet….Adobe keeps drafting our credit cards, no matter how bad it gets. Where do we go for a refund until LR gets fixed?

Ejection features are the least of my worries…since I can’t even get to the import dialog to start the process. After the update to the update, LR crashes on opening. I just flew from my LA studio to Sydney bringing a great deal of work with me to finish while here. As of the update LR crashes on start-up. I have read all the workarounds which require one to access the preferences menu which, of course, you can’t do unless you can get the program to stay open a few seconds which isn’t happening at the moment. A request for help over at the Adobe forum elicited a response basically to un-install the program, un-install all of my Adobe programs and related material…reload the updated version of LR, spend the better part of the next week getting all the plugins, presets export programs etc. that I had attached to LR and my other Adobe programs working since I joined the “Creative Cloud” at the beginning and hope it then works. This is NOT a useful solution. Please devise a patch that we who are non-programmers can use to roll the program back to 6.0 or 6.1. I love Adobe and the Cloud but this is inexcusable and I am basically dead in the water until there is another update to fix the update of the update. 🙂 All kidding aside, please rectify this ASAP. Thanks 🙂

Where’s the apology for the patch? You’ve moved the crash to the exit instead of the launch (slow hand clap), but now the import takes the exposure slider all the way to the left, and the actual exposure loss is worse than appears as sliding exposure back does not bring the picture back. LR is dead in the water. When are you fixing the fix? I’ll go ahead and save time and ask now when you’ll fix the fix of the fix.

That’s correct! The so-called patch was a horrific failure. Nothing has been patched. I had to uninstall 6.2.1 and reinstall 6.1 and then patch that with the 6.1.1 patch. And everything I imported while in 6.2.1—albeit, thank the gods, not much—had to be deleted and re-imported because they were black images.
Quite possibly the worst point upgrade in the history of upgrades.

I’m a professional photographer, and been working with Lightroom since the beginning as both alpha and beta tester. While I appreciate the intention to make the import process simpler, I believe that a couple decisions has had the opposite result, making it more confusing and difficult to use.

(1) the remove of the option to eject media after import:
Proper practice is to safely eject any media before removing it from the card reader. When you are doing a photoshoot, you end up ejecting the card dozens of times a day. When the option existed to have LR eject the card, you could do this process quickly and safely. But now, you need to remember to switch to the Finder and manually eject the card after each import, or face the OS warning that you did not eject the card properly. I am not sure why this option was considered too complicated for new users, since it actually helps them work more safely with their media.

(2) Dimming/obscuring thumbnails of images to be imported:
The new design obscures the preview thumbnails of the images you have selected to import by dimming them and partially covering them with a large checkmark. First, this is contrary to the UI cues used in the Library, were a dimmed image mean is is rejected. Second, this means you have no way of visually confirming if these photos are the ones you want to import or not unless you counterintuitively unselect it for import and move your mouse away.

I stick to some of the other comments up there: Offer both import dialogues like “easy” and “advanced” or whatever names. Like that you really offer your professional users the quality they liked and worked with for years now!

Tom, I really hope that you are reading all this complaints. If there was anything daunting in Lr it’s the speed but not the import. I really hop that you bring back the old dialog.
Or is this just the first step in redesigning the whole LR interface? Why should there be a develop-module necessary as there are quick adjustments? Simply kill the dev-module with all it’s daunting little sliders I don’t know how to use right…

I doubt anyone at Adobe is still reading – and this has nothing to do with the most recent releases..
But I’m still annoyed that LR 6 forces the catalog backup to be zipped! I use a plugin called “TPG LR Backup” which is now fairly useless. The nice thing about that plugin though is that it would zip the catalog in the background, while still being able to work in LR. Now I have to wait, not able to use LR while the catalog is zipped. I have a disability in which I exit solely to backup the catalog very frequently, because I don’t want to lose any changes I’ve made. Of course I write the changes to XMP also, but it still takes a lot of time to backup the catalog – which includes things that writing out XMP doesn’t. Unfortunately the author of TPG LR Backup doesn’t seem to be updating his addon to at least allow for a uniform backup name in a specified single directory.

Hopefully someone is still reading these and can make this change in a future release – perhaps an option of whether or not to zip the catalog is in order here.

This move is a big misake, really….
Adobe, I usually love you. LR is my software of choice for my catalog of over 130K pictures, and I’ve been using you since LR2.
Let me tell you something – there is one thing that your telemetry tool is probably very bad at: I set up MY preferred configuration, and then change it seldomly. That I do not click buttons does not mean that I do not use them…for example, I check the destination folders EVERY TIME I do an Import. I check the destination filename, and although I do not change it… I make sure that everything is all right….
I won’t repeat again what everybody is already saying, only…

WE ARE YOUR POWER USERS, AND YOUR MAIN RECOMMENDATORS (to our friends, family, etc…). WE HAVE NOT ASKED FOR THIS!
Add an easy mode if you will, but don’t treat us for dummies, please.

I hate to say, but these actions just add myself to the pool of people starting to check other software makers software….

I don’t know where and how to begin without being sarcastic… but are you totally oblivious to the needs of the pro users and I dare to say 99% of the amateur photographers? Do you care even a tiny bit? You should really bring back the old import dialog, because there was no problem with it. LR (or each software of this kind) is not ment for people who are not willing to spend at least 5 minutes learning how to use an import dialog and everybody with an average IQ needs less than that. It’s not that difficult and it was not that difficult. There is a saying of Einstein “Everything Should Be Made as Simple as Possible, But Not Simpler” Your change was the latter. I hope you care for your customers because the customers are the kings. They pay you, they pay adobe. You could at least implement an option for the old dialog, which 99,9999% prefer and the new one (for folks without a brain… but ey, what will they do after the import … LR is to complex for them…)

Having downloaded and installed the update to fix the error that is Lightroom 6.2 I still find the import process buggy. Also commenting in the library module only works 50% of the time and the whole program is running very slow. Please up date the update and fix all these problems. Roll it back to how thing where in LR 6.1 as I’m yet to see any pluses in LR 6.2

Glad to hear you are reading all the comments Tom. Must be a daunting experience. I have found your/adobe response to this debacle to be most interesting.

On the one hand there is some evidence that you are listening in the responses that you and Sharad published here and your statement that there will be another release later this week, although I am still waiting to hear you say that all the import functionality will be reinstated. Why are you being coy about this?

On the other hand, actions speak louder than words and we have endured a number of negative actions like botched releases, removal of functionality, poor reliability, poor performance, poor design decisions, inconsistent UI elements, modest amount of enhancements and failure to address long requested shortcomings in the program.

If you are truly going back to the drawing board I am encouraged, but it is going to take a lot of action to get me to the point where I can recommend lightroom to others. I wonder how many new lightroom customers come from the advice of existing users?

Interface design by Adobe: you get a bunch of thumbnails, but you can’t recognize the images because they are dimmed and covered by a huge checkmark. Those are the images that will be imported. You want to know what those images are? Uncheck them, so you can properly see them. But wait, doesn’t unchecking mean they will NOT be imported? Yes indeed, so after you’ve looked at the unchecked images, you have to check them again so they will be imported. That’s how we make Lightroom easier to understand for newbies…

The apology is a very good start. I have stopped learning Capture One, and renewed my CC Photography plan and will give you a few months to come through on your statements.

In terms of the import screen, the original justification given for the rewrite was that new users could not use it. The way it was stated, very much lent itself to a consideration that you only were concerned about the selfie crowd Apple has chased with the new Photos app which even decides if you want whole or skim milk with the image (just a little bit of an exaggeration). It was this attitude more then anything else which made me cancel and start looking at Capture One.

The original import screen was designed by a engineer; not by a UI specialist. As such, it was ripe for a significant overhaul. I commend you for trying to go in that direction; but I will say the removal of features and the way the downgrade of functionality was handled was about the worst I have ever seen from Adobe, or any software company for that matter.
Hopefully, you guys will restore the functionality, fix the massive bugs, re-learn what beta-testing means, and learn that the phrase “lies, damn lies and statistics” applies to the metrics you have gathered. I along with many of the more sophisticated users, which seem your target market, have always disabled such data gathering programs.

Adobe has already apologized for fumbling its latest Lightroom update, which was riddled with bugs and missing features. Now there’s a new story that’s putting a stain on Adobe’s image: a new test has found that the latest Lightroom is about 600% slower than its competitors.

Jim Harmer of Improve Photography writes that Lightroom now has “dramatically poorer performance” when compared to alternatives out there such as Capture One, Photo Mechanic, and Apple’s new Photos app.

“My question is if I should be looking at alternatives to Lightroom to improve the culling process, which has progressively gotten slower with each version of Lightroom over the last 18 months,” Harmer writes.

To test Lightroom’s performance, Harmer took 97 RAW photos shot with a Fuji X-T1 and imported the photos (on his hard drive) into each program. Here’s a chart showing how long each program took (the longer the bar, the slower the performance):

Apple Photos was by far the fastest: the full import too just 9 seconds. Photo Mechanic wasn’t far behind, clocking in at 12 seconds. Capture One was slower, taking 27 seconds to bring in the photos and 114 seconds to build full previews. Finally, Lightroom took 190 seconds just to bring in the photos, and a whopping 685 seconds to build full previews.

Adobe said:
quote To all the disappointed perpetual users, you’re getting the same level of update support in previous versions of Lightroom, which is ongoing lens and camera support. If you weren’t aware of why new features can’t be added to perpetual software, it’s because the US Government has made ‘it illegal for a vendor to add unadvertised features to software that has already been paid for through the Sarbanes-Oxley act’ as noted by Micah Burke in the Lightroom Journal comments. If you want this changed and you’re a US citizen, then start lobbying your politicians. While people will use this a vehicle to imply greed on the part of Adobe, it’s simply Adobe complying with a law they have no say over. It doesn’t apply to the subscription model because you’re renting the software. /quote

Adobe if you want to think this ‘new’ interface is a change in a feature and not a new one, you are deluded. You called the old interface “daunting.” If the interface it not daunting, it’s new.

Why is dehaze not a feature change in clarity?

If that is true, then why did you give the perpetual license users the ‘new’ interface?

+1
It is now quite clear that the SOX talk was just a way to hide Adobe marketing push to get more $ from all the beta testers – oops I mean CC customers. The change to Import proves it even more than the dehaze presets and plugin for Lr 6.

It pleasant that you’ve already apologized but seriously whose driving the car here? Major changes (that don’t work well) and majorly change your work flow with ZERO warning? Who does that? I’m a working photographer slammed in my busiest season ever and I come to the office to quickly upload my images…and What? I don’t know how to anymore! My product is completely different and I don’t know where any of my import items are.
Add to that, the start up process was glacial. SERIOUSLY, give someone a heads up when you’re going to redesign the workflow. By the way, I hate the new import simplification. I took the time to learn the old way and clearly you’ve dumbed it down for cell phone users. I made the mistake of thinking this was a photographer’s/artist software and not for the cute selfie taking crowd.

Hey,
just wanted to say that I noticed this blog post by accident and find it very pleasing to know that you as the developers care about us users and I am glad that I am paying money for using your top of the line product.
That said, thinking about it, I answered several Adobe surveys all about pricing, etc. Nothing about in depth usage of particular products. Like what do the users really care about, what works well, what could be better. Maybe do surveys about Lightroom. Or have a usage reporting thingie in lightroom users can opt-in to, just like mozilla has it.
All the best
Tobias

Lightroom has become unusable even with this bug fix. I depend on Lightroom every day to just work. I hate having to explain to clients that I can’t meet my deadlines because the software is broken. I’ve downloaded Capture One as an alternative to complete my jobs. You’ve lost a customer if I like it after 30 days.

Just got back home from a vacation photo shoot. Updated Lightroom before we left. Went to import photos and #%{}}*++##! What has Adobe done? Quickly restored my Win 8 and thanked the good Lord that I had not downgraded from Lightroom 6.1.1 on my Macs. If Adobe has so misunderstood its customers, let this yet be another appeal to restore the full import functions in Lightroom. We use all of them from time to time. All this update did was to destroy our workflow. We never minded changes to software as Lon as the changes were improvements. THIS IS NOT! We turn off analytics so you should not be tracking our stuff. Take a look at Proshow, another very advanced program that found an easy wAy to include novices with the simple use of wizards. With those, everyone can create professional looking products. Adobe would do well to learn from them. And your apology seems nothing except an arrogant response. Learn here from the incredible Windows 8 fail. Lightroom 6.2 is right up there with Microsoft. We do not understand why a company that has never been afraid of complexity suddenly came down on Lightroom import. It seems inconsistent and a dismal prelude to dummying-down things to come. If this is adobe’s course, my subscription is out in a couple of months. ACDSee is quickly improving and their latest offering is starting to leave you in the dust. Other than your insincere apology, because nothing has changed, for us, Adobe is standing on the thinnest ice. Restore Import soon.

Bring back auto eject for flashcards.
Bring back the regular import dialog.
Quit trying to dumb down Lightroom.
Listen and act on your users’ requests in a timely manner instead of offering excuses on why something cannot by done.

I’m not a professional photographer. I’m a relatively new user of Lightroom. So, in theory, I’m the target demographic for the import changes.

And I hate them.

I’ve been an avid Mac user since 1985. Until this year, iPhoto met my digital-photography needs. Okay, when I finally got around to purchasing a DSLR, it started showing some limits, but it worked.

Then, Apple decided that iPhoto’s interface was too complex for new users, and they brought out Photos.

Photos eliminated many features in iPhoto, particularly those useful to experienced users. It introduced numerous bugs. It brought in a theoretically “friendly” interface that was inscrutable and difficult to use. At the same time, Apple eliminated their professional Aperture application, so that wasn’t an option. Adobe can thank Apple for directly driving me into Adobe’s $9.99/month arms.

But if Adobe is going to go down the same path—taking a powerful app and dumbing it down to the lowest-common-grandma level—then I might as well stop paying Adobe and go back to dealing with Photos. Apple doesn’t charge me anything for Photos.

Yes, the old import interface was a little busy. It could have benefited from an improved layout. It didn’t need to be nuked and replaced with the interface from an iPad. If you care enough about photography to pay $10/mo for a photo organization and editing tool, you probably want considerable control over your photos, and that’s what the old interface provided. It’s actually MORE confusing, because so many options are hidden and abbreviated.

Take choosing an import location. One place where Photos failed me is storing pictures on a network storage device. Lightroom, before this version, made it pretty easy, and it was reasonably easy to verify that pictures would go to the share instead of to a local drive. With the new import dialog, I have to click on the gear, click Destination, then click “Select” to find out WHERE my “Lightroom data” destination folder is—the internal drive? The external drive? The network share? I could tell this at a glance with the old interface.

Adobe gained customers because Apple alienated power users with Photos. For Adobe to then alienate power users by making Lightroom work more like Photos is, well, absurdly incompetent management. It plays away from the strength of your product and away from your growth opportunity.

[“…dumbing it down to the lowest-common-grandma level—then I might as well…”]
Hey Rob, some of us who are just as affected and perhaps just as professional as others here are actually “grandmas” and grandpas I dare say. You shouldn’t make statements like that.

Look. Adobe seems hell bent on fixing what wasn’t broken. For some reason they convinced themselves that the Import dialog as too confusing or too cumbersome or some such non sense. Now the managers are married to the idea. They don’t want to appear like they threw tons of time and money down a rat hole (after all performance review and bonus calculation time is coming up) so they will stay married to this misguided idea that the Import Dialog must be dumbed down.

At this point I think the only hope is that if everyone who feels strongly about this keeps bombarding these Adobe feedback pathways with a simple “Put back the old Import dialog without change” message. Plain and simple. No long verbiage needed. No debates on the merits of the Eject, or any other option. just lots of people saying the same thing – :Put Back the Old Import Dialog Without Change.

What happened to “Move” on import?? 90% of all the people who come to me for training on LR have images scattered all over their PC. Now they have LR and the first thing I show them is how to import into LR and use Move to organize their existing files into a manageable hierarchy.

So please as everyone else has said please put back the original import dialog – at the very least as an option!

I agree with the Import issues. Adobe BAD.
The one feature I was looking forward to updating was the “Dehaze” , but alas it is only for the CC version(ie monthly subscription) and not for the eternal (is anything eternal) license.
Must I look at other providers?

To TH and the Lightroom Management Team: While you’re at it (fixing Lightroom), please fix the issue where Tether Capture will not work with Nikon Cameras and El Capitan. It’s very frustrating not being able to utilize this feature of Lightroom after using it for several and years and coming to rely on it.

I cannot figure out how to select “move” in the import dialog. Under “File Handling” I see Copy and Add, but not move. I have tried searching, but cannot seem to find it. Could you please put the move functionality in a more obvious place?

Thanks (looks like you have a lot of suggestions, hopefully this is an easy change to make),
Mike

LR Team:
My workflow, which includes import and naming presets using custom text and copy destination, was setup in 2006. Not having a visible destination path or file name preview seriously impacts my workflow. Please restore these features, as well as eject after import.

You need to continue to support your professional and advanced users. They are the ones who have paid for and purchased LR over the years.

You can maintain both a “simple” and “advanced” import GUI and expose the appropriate functions.

Adobe ,you need to reinstate the import features and anything else you have removed from Lightroom. I have been using this software since Lightroom 2.. I have updated each time, glad I never clicked the update button this time , so many pro photographers had their workflow wrecked.
All to suit the newbies!, you need to get together with the professional photographers and people like me who subscribe to cc because they wanted the convenience of having the latest updates all the time. This is not the service I signed up for and am paying good money for. I could get a similar editing programme to the new interface for free.
I expect to see a reinstated Lightroom 6 soon. Maybe listen to the clients who are telling you to have an elements dummies version and a professional version. Can’t be too hard surely.,???? Listen to,your valued clients for a change not he instagramme selfie brigade.!!

My primary complaint is speed. Even the second new release has performance problems which in the import process. I was very happy with the previous method but probably could get used to the new one except for the hit to performance. It made this software go from a must have to unworkable.

The Mac version is still highly unstable, even if it doesn’t just crash anymore like after the initial update it still kind of “locks up” in semi working state after doing a couple of operations upon launching the app. For example filtering based on flag status will work if it’s the first thing you do after launching the app, but if you browse a bit and switch between modules a couple of times selecting it will have no actual action. When it enters this state mouse operation also breaks, for example click and drag on a zoomed picture won’t work to scroll through the photo, LR will just take the click alone and toggle zoom completely ignoring the fact the mouse button is still held down to scroll. Flagging a photo shows the “flag as pick” notice, and that never disappears anymore.

I’ve been on an important shoot these past days and these bugs (the constant crashes on the first shoot day, and the above issues on the next days after the latest update) made LR basically unusable on my on-set machine (Retina MacBook Pro with El Capitan). Fortunately I have a Windows PC at home also with the latest version but that was not afffected by the reliability issues, just the usual slow performance. When do we get a properly multithreaded app that makes decent use of current machines’ many cores without spending most of its time waiting?

I can totally imagine what happened here. One of the managers went home for summer vacation. He met his whole familiy and his granny said: “Hey boy, how you’re doin’ at work?” He replied: “Hey granny. Look, I’m working with this team on a fantastic photosoftware. You just put your SD-Card in your computer and … wait … there comes up the import. You can see all your photos taken and select where to import. See…”
“Ohhh boy, that’s to complicated for me. Look at my new iPad, that’s an easy way to look at all the photos.”
He couldn’t sleep for two weeks. After he returned back to work, he pushed his team to get an easy import-dialog so he can satisfy his grand-ma. This had to be done fast, so he can show his new work on Thanksgiving to his beloved granny.

Hell, man. This is a bugfix-release. I bought Lightroom 6 because I don’t want no cloud-managed software. I want to keep my workflow like it is at the time I buy the software. You take away functionality with a bugfix-release! Keep your hands away from that. You communicated in the past, you can only add new functions in the CC-Version. So, why can you take away functionality in Lightroom 6? Bring back the import-dialog to Lightroom 6, it has no Rolling Release mechanisms!

PUT BACK THE OLD IMPORT DIALOG WITHOUT CHANGE
There is a French proverb which says “Des erreurs se commettent et se paient” i.e. “Errors are made, and have to be paid for”. So please, don’t make it worse by having a stonewalling attitude.

Agree. If LR will offer a simple import for new or unexperienced users – well, that’s a fine thing. But do not forget about all the users, who have their workflows since years.
Just bring back the old Import-Dialog – as en ‘expert-mode’ if you wish, but bring it back.
(In fact, Adobe should feel proud about all the complains – it just says, that LR is a good product and no one here want’s to look out for an alternative)

I updated Lightroom. And now each time I open an image and click on the develop module it opens the image in a distorted view almost like a infra view. Don’t know how to fix it – never seen it like that before

Please consider your intended user segment for Lightroom. I thought it was for professional, semi-pro and keen amateur photographers who require (or at least are comfortable with) a certain level of technical sophistication of the product. Please don’t ‘improve’ the interface by removing functionality, it’s a race to the bottom, and will result in a product that can be used by anyone but that is useless to everyone. LR product documentation is good, and novice users should be encouraged to learn the product’s functionality and power. There is always room for UX improvement but let’s not confuse great UX with decreasing overall functionality. Perhaps you could consider creating a ‘novice mode’ where some of the knobs and switches are hidden? This is different from hiding functions inside a settings box for all users.

Tom,
Nobody in this situation is pure, be it someone responding here, back at LR etc… We’ve all made mistakes in our lives. The key is what we did next. LR has a legitimate concern for newcomers regarding the import function and a responsibility to it’s long standing customer base. The path is quite obvious, maintain simplicity for the novices (tomorrow’s loyal customer) while supporting the exiting base of more experienced users. Do what is right and move on. There is a positive outcome. Your customers experience a mistake, see it was corrected properly, come to understand LR in fact does listen to it’s users. It is hard to argue with a company when after a faux pas they react in a completely positive manner supporting all users. The is the mark to building customer loyalty and company respect.

well, there is a good thing in all of this after all. I never even considered using Capture One instead of Lightroom until I read about it in this discussion. Today I found that CaptureOne actually renders colors much better than Lightroom i.e. closer to the original camera manufacturer’s profile. This is fantastic! For many uses (accurate skin color reproduction) I had to develop an insanely cumbersome workflow importing pictures via Canon CPP and transfering them via tiff format because Lightroom only reproduced dark green faces from images shot with my Canon 1D X.
RAW images imported into CPP look great straight out of the camera while it seems to be pretty much impossible to reproduce these beautiful and natural skin tones using Lightroom.
Anyway, as Lightroom currently crashes every time I try to export phoots from it I am right now considering changing my whole workflow – which was established over many years – to switch over to Capture One.

And PLEASE do not think that your customers are just like the ones you survey via telemetry features in your software. Almost every professional I know blocks spyware features in Adobe, Apple, Microsoft etc. products by default. That way you will only learn about your most ignorant users. Now you may argue that those are the ones who bring the money because there are more of them, but the pros are the ones who publish the tutorials and support your users in forums. If these people start moving to other products, the herd will follow.

I have just recently switched over from Photoshop – which I have been using for over 20 years – to Affinity Photo. Please don’t chase me away from Lightroom too.

I can totally imagine what happened here. One of the managers went home for summer vacation. He met his whole familiy and his granny said:
“Hey boy, how you’re doin’ at work?” He replied: “Hey granny. Look, I’m working with this team on a fantastic photosoftware. You just put your SD-Card in your computer and … wait … there comes up the import. You can see all your photos taken and select where to import. See…”
“Ohhh boy, that’s to complicated for me. Look at my new iPad, that’s an easy way to look at all the photos.”
He couldn’t sleep for two weeks. After he returned back to work, he pushed his team to get an easy import-dialog so he can satisfy his grand-ma. This had to be done fast, so he can show his new work on Thanksgiving to his beloved granny.

Hell, man. This is a bugfix-releas. I bought Lightroom 6 because I don’t want no cloud-managed software. I want to keep my workflow like it is at the time I buy the software. You take away functionality with a bugfix-release! Keep your hands away from that. You communicated in the past, you can only add new functions in the CC-Version. So, why can you take away functionality in Lightroom 6? Bring back the import-dialog to Lightroom 6, it has no Rolling Release mechanisms!

why does anyone just nag at the new Import dialog? What about the COUNTLESS BUGS that are in the Software since 2 major versions now?

1. Start Lightroom on a multiple screen Mac (Mavaricks or Yosemite, doesn’t matter) and it almost never shows up on the same screen when finished. Because I use full-screen with menu I will always have to switch to normal mode, the maximize and put back to full screen with menu again. ARGH

2. Go to the single page view in bib – Press CMD-J to show the display option. The check is set but the camera information on the screen doesn’t show up most of the time …. So uncheck und check to get it 🙁

3. Performance: I went back because 6.2 is SO POOR in performance that outrages 6.1 – which is on most of my Macs (I have 3) MUCH slower than 5.7.1.

4. Go create a virtual copy of each image and use a different preset. Then open the brush and it won’t take long the brush is not able to be used. You have to end Lightroom and start it up again.

5. I use an own catalog for each shooting – WHY the HELL do I always have to “save metadata”, remove the “make backup” check (I backup the whole disk – I don’t need LR catalog copies!) and the mobile switch Always appears again and again. Hell I want defaults for new catalogs!

The import dialog sucks? Who cares, if the Software itself is nearly un-useable. I already bought Capture One because Adobe tries to PUSH me to the Cloud and I WILL NOT RENT SOFTWARE ever again. I also inspect EACH version of RAW converter I can get my hands on.
Honestly The ONLY reason to stay at the moment is: My own Presets, Fuji Film Simulations build in and the Crop tool – I HATE the way to crop in Photoshop and any other image tool, except Lightroom.

Go team: parallelize stuff and put lots of things in the background. Why does Lightroom not render full-size previews AND STORE THEM when I already used the develop tool on an image? Why does Lightroom not render stuff if the Computer is not used? And get rid of all those bugs!

One more thing: I will NEVER use Photo Books, Maps and Flikr or other export filters. Why do I have to load this stuff wasting my RAM? Make this configurable to remove or add as needed! I will also never use face detection. I am not only a photographer but also a software developer and I KNOW that most engineers prefer to implement new features instead of stabilization and optimization of UI / performance. But this is what keeps your customers ….

1. the new import is extremely awful – I do NOT see what images will be stored where and if LR does insert new images in already existing folders or not
If Adobe thinks the old import was to difficult for less experienced user – what is Adobe’s plan to simplify the rest of LR Modules – first of all the develop module? To be honest, it is more complicated to switch from a monthly paid CC Model of your Cloud Software to a yearly paid, than the old import dialogue was (just last week done – more than 1 hour on phone with more than 3 call center agents on the line)

2. Performance of LR and – if LR is running, whole mac os – slows down drastically. it is not possible to work with the images inside the catalogue because of the performance issues.

3. If I close LR the LR Task will not be closed at all and system says LR is not reacting till I force to quit the still running task. MAC OS performance is very slow till I force to quit the already running task.

For me it is completely inconceivable that Adobe say, they were well aware the the update has major bugs – but decided to send out the bug-version to the end user anyway, before they fix the bugs – and send out some days later a fix update, which – as you see in the many post above – is fixing nothing.
It is a non-serious way to do things, to delete working features by not warning the users (who have paid for that features!), and roll out something that is knowingly not working in a way paying user can expect.

I can’t say if there are more bugs in the update – LR is currently to slow to work with, so I can’t test. LR is not working any more. It is that simple!

Hi Tom,
I updated to 6.2 and was shocked – by the poor performance and by the ripped import dialogue. Essential features like the folders, the “eject when done” are not coming back, no support for power users who supported the program for long times. For me, the decision is clear – Lightroom won’t become better than 6.1 – so I’ll skip my CC abo for a one time purchase of it and stay with it as long as possible.
Regards Steffen

Add me to the list of annoyed users. The lack of Move is annoying but I can work around it. I didn’t use it much but when I did, it was very useful. The option that is killing me is the lack of destination folder tree. Being able to unselect folders that I know I have imported before but deleted poor photos from was key. Now I have to unselect all the photos before import manually. That can be hundreds of photos.

Is it possible to just reinstall the 6.1 release? That would seem like a WONDERFUL solution for the time being.
Events like this remind me why industries get disrupted. You piss off someone who has the ability to make something and ultimately they’ll do it. Antagonize an entire installed base of otherwise happy users and someone will be moved to action. We’d all prefer it if Adobe would just do the “right” thing and listen to their actual users. My count? On two computers – over 190,000 images. Bring back what we like and know and find useful. Stop thinking that pretty is better.

Dear Adobe,
I have had to roll back this update because it appears you did not analyse the general end-user requirements in detail as part of the SDLC.

Changing the import screen without careful consideration interms of human computer interface design is somewhat shocking. The new interface for advanced / well seasoned users is of an abhorrence and it not particularly friendly at all.

Removing features which I have used in the past, move and eject SD card seems like a retrostep backwards.

Did you as part of the SDLC really consult the wider-end user community and gather the functional requirements of the community ?

It’s OK to give a new import dialog to LR6 users, but not dehaze (which was released a scant two months after the 6.0 release, which means it was held back intentionally, as it obviously wasn’t coded in two months)?

And it’s OK to rip stuff out of the import that “no one” is using, when obviously there are a lot of “no ones” out there who DO use it?

And it’s OK to ship the product with a known crashing bug (not a known bug, a known CRASHING bug)? Because presumably it was so critical to take away those capabilities from users it had to be done IMMEDIATELY!

Here’s a clue, since you obviously can’t buy one — none of that is OK. Adobe is not only tone deaf to its customers, it’s now actively abusing them. I’ve used LR since LR2, but I’m actively investigating alternatives. I hope to be off of it by early next year. I would rather do business with Microsoft than Adobe, and as an all Apple household since 2009, that’s saying something.

Despite the complaints about the import redevelopment, I’ve been hoping to try this update in hopes that some funky bugs in 6.1 are fixed (eg, seeing black rectangles when switching between the the Develop Module and the Library View, losing crops when you rotate it a little, little or no processing speed improvement compared to 5.7, etc). But I have spent days not being able to even log into the Adobe Updater. I have signed out and signed back in to no avail. Same thing happened to me for a couple days when version 6 came out.

It’s perfectly valid to read up literature to get the best from a professional-level product to avoid a lot of time-consuming trial & error – but other than with PS, I don’t think it’s strictly necessary.

I feel rather advanced with LR and have never read a tutorial in my life. Looking at the comparisons of the “old” and new/crippled import screen, the abandoned one had a perfectly logical layout. Yes, you might hide some “low usage” features for the sake of first-time users, but if people from the new focus groups aren’t able to import shots at all it makes you really wonder where Adobe is heading with LR:

I saw this coming already a few years ago, when CC was introduced. There was a lot of discussion and complaints that now Adobe has no incentive to innovate or make their products better. I was one of the hardest critics, and swore never to join CC. Well, my photography business did grow, and after a while I actually thought that it will be good to have the most competitive software as my main tool. Well, guess what? With this release it occurred to me, that you guys actually don’t have a plan of how to make LR better and faster for us photographers. Your only agenda is to get more customers, by trying to appeal to the broad audience. I seriously hope you do understand what will happen, people will flee in huge crowds as soon as the word gets out that there is something better out there. Don’t underestimate how fast the word will spread in the digital age.

So, I’m actually not happy anymore if you restore the import dialogue (which is a must). I want more. I want to see what I’m paying for. I want to take part in discussing, and understand which direction this software is heading. For me this is really simple in the end, I’m in no way loyal to Adobe. Adobe has not been loyal to paying customers, and I will jump ship as soon as I’m confident there is an alternative. Capture One is getting critical mass right now, and you guys should really watch what you do. Making it impossible to cancel a subscription will not save you, I hope you understand that.

I appreciate the apology, but your test group did not represent your users. Users who wish to use professional level products do their homework. They take classes, they read books. When you simplify and remove valid features to bring in more ‘people in their homes’ instead of photographers and even web designers who handle a lot of images and have catalogues of over 30,000 images to decide what is being used you alienate your primary customer base. What would have been so difficult about having an advanced check box that kept the import process up to the level of what your professional base uses. You could have the ‘default screen’ be the feature-less stream-lined import experience that you were aiming for. You need to restore ALL of the import features, they all worked fine, just have them display when ‘Advanced Import’ is checked. For the life of me I don’t understand why you would use a test group unfamiliar with the product to decide whether or not to keep a feature. To use an Adobe analogy that would be like removing layers, or filters from Photoshop because it is much too difficult to use when you first sit down to use the product. With any good professional product there is a necessary learning curve. I guess I misunderstood who your client base was for Lightroom, I thought that it was pro, semi-pro, and avid photographers who would not have a problem reading a few chapters in a Scott Kelby book if they wanted to know how to really make Lightroom import bend to their will. I noticed that you wrote ‘Went to their homes.. did you think about maybe going to users ‘Studios’ and businesses as we are more than likely the ones buying the software and subscribing to Creative Cloud on a monthly basis year after year.. Just to give you a glimpse in a typical user : I own a small web design business, I receive photos in bulk from clients, or sometimes piece-meal and as such being able to set destinations, moving, or adding, renaming during import is important to me, I am also an avid photographer who occasionally shoots for hire, so I also have over 30,000 photos in one of my catalogues and being able to import as we could until recently has been a huge timesaver and really prompted me to recommend Lightroom to others. As of this latest change until I see you listening and reversing your stance on removed Import function I will no longer be recommending Lightroom to friends and clients.

The horrors are in both versions. But Adobe makes sure there are good reasons for CC as you get the new features only by subscribing, with the stand-alone versions it’s just the bugs and the crippled import dialog 🙂

I am the Scott ranting right above your comment. I have been a CC monthly subscriber for several years now, since right after Creative Cloud came online. I was using CS4 a, CS5 before that, I can’t speak for stand alone Lightroom. The product that I am complaining about and am now using is the new ‘Updated’ or as I think of it ‘DownDated’ latest version of Lightroom CC 2015.

Which as you can read I was one of the many users who are fairly unhappy. From a customer approval level this is somewhat of a disaster. Busy professionals don’t have time to waste posting complaints, so when we do a corporation should sit up and take notice. I would wager for every written complaint there are thousands who are extremely unhappy but don’t have the time or don’t know where to voice their ire.
Adobe should have their task force do some basic market research, how many people actually take the time to write, vs how many that represents on average.

The responses say it all. You guys really screwed the pooch on this one. The old import worked fine. It was elegant in its function. Maybe not as “pretty” as the new format but it worked and worked well. Very well, in fact. I appreciate your apology, but until I hear “we’ll bring it bad like it was, but only better” I have to cast my vote as essentially a slap in the face to your customers. I have always upgraded knowing that things would be better and if there were a problem, you would make it right, fast. I feel cheated this time. I do not make my living with photography, but I do enrich my life with it. This kind of arrogant “take it or leave it” approach is unconscionable. I’m not gonna leave Lightroom. I have too much time, money and images invested in it. However, if this doesn’t get fixed and fixed right, I will not recommend Adobe. Remember, when Lightroom was developed you asked all of us to comment and tell you what we wanted and didn’t want. You listened. Even soft proofing, which I am sure was a monster to code, but you did it. Well you didn’t ask us this time, you just forced it upon us. Now we are telling you what we want and don’t want. Are you really listening? I worked for AT&T for over 20 years, in sales and financial management. I know what happens when you don’t listen to your customer. Don’t let bad things happen to Adobe. Listen.

We shouldn’t be surprised after all. This is not the first time that Adobe has bulldozed something through even though many customers were against it. (remember the advent of Creative Clout?) If the corporate will is in favour of something, the customers are crying in the breeze.

I will be surprised (apology notwithstanding) if Adobe backtracks on this. They have a track record of NOT listening to their customers. Bad! Bad! Bad!

Tom your comment “Our customers, educators and research team have been very clear on this topic” begs the question of how many of these folks are independent (from Adobe) working professionals? I cover events with multiple cameras and at times a second and third shooter. This makes in the ingest process paramount in the workflow, and the ability to easily import duplicates efficiently a necessity. Were these corner cases in the feedback and thought process before you made the decision to cripple the import process?

This latest release of LR must be a nightmare both internally and externally on the PR front, with the user frustration being reported in the main stream media.

Looking forward to hearing your go-forward plans in the next day or so, and hoping you will provide an update that will keep the working professionals that use your product happy campers.

This update debacle has cost me, and I’m sure many others, hours of wasted time in trying to get Lightroom to work. It was the most ill planned and executed thing I have ever seen Adobe do, and I have been a LR user from day one. Please get us a fix asap. I have work piling up.

Dear Tom,
I am using Lightroom since version 2. First time I’m totally disappointed by an update. Removing
– choose and display destination folder including number of photos and size
– move
– import duplicates
– loupe view
– filename preview
– thumbnail filtering by destination folder
complicates the workflow and increases mistakes on imports as one can not check the settings. I kindly but explicitly request this functions to be reintroduced.
Please allow me to note the inconsistent customer policy i.e.customer treatment by Adobe. While you deprive standalone Lightroom users of the new dehaze function referring to the Sarbanes Oxley Act you deem it reasonable to remove functionality users have paid for by the means of an update. This is at least questionable as you have received and posted the revenue out of this transaction based on a defined functionality. I would appreciate a new update returning the functionality. There are means to simplify the user interface by tabs or submenus without deleting functionality.

The bug is not the main issue – although it’s incredible embarrassing that one of the worlds leading software company has such poor QC and judgement – when in doubt – DON’T SHIP!!! Not a single user NEEDED this update. So rookie mistake number one …
Of course the real biggie is the removal of features from the import dialog – apart from been infuriatingly arrogant to a lot of pro users, it absolutely boggles the mind that you are so out of touch with your userbase that you didn’t see the negative impact this would have. Again, this is not something you would expect from a company like Adobe. Removal of features? Come on guys – how many years have you been working with software development ? YOU JUST DON’T DO IT !! You need EXTREMELY good reasons to remove features – this IS THE ONE THING YOU DON’T DO LIGHTLY ! This is textbook rookie mistakes – all faith lost Adobe – and now, instead of digging the hole any deeper – FIX this mess and BRING BACK THE MISSING FEATURES!

I have little to add to the existing posts except to add my voice to the discontent among LR users. Make a simpler option available for new or potential users but take note of what your existing customers are saying, and PLEASE give us back the Import dialogue as it was. Oh, while I’m here: it would be great to see LR fully compatible with Fuji X-series gear too!

Additional to my last post: I’m now Adobe Lightroom Trainer for four years and have a lot done for advertising for Adobe. With my trainings and a lot of videos on youtube. But at the moment I’m thinking about to move to Capture One….
I’m working in IT for more than 20 years. Has a lot experience with different sofware companies including SAP, Microsoft and other. Bad this is the worst update I’ve ever seen. A lot of informations and functions are gone. Lightroom is getting slower and slower… (see also here: http://petapixel.com/2015/10/13/lightroom-import-is-600-slower-than-competition/#more-186103).
And on the other hand the very bad and money making licence policy….
I just install C1 – bye Adobe

As a used of Lightroom 6.1 and Photoshop CS6, I was almost ready to jump onto the Photographer CC. Now, that isn’t going to happen for a long time. I’m scared of the direction Lightroom is taking. I would not have even looked at CaptureOne before this.

Now I’m getting familiar with the trial and actually liking it. If they get slightly better DAM and plugins, I see no reason to use the slow piece of software that Lightroom has become. Doubly so if it keeps getting hobbled, in an attempt to make a professional tool usable for non-professionals.

I think it is a simple as this was a bad idea. Just back it out and give us back the old import module and we will pretend this never happened. Don’t try and fix what we don’t want. Please change this back.
thanks

Tom,
I’ve installed 2015 cc.2 and reverted back to 2015 cc.1.1 because of the import dialog changes. This reply is not to pile-on because the heap is quite high or to be disrespectful, but to get counted as not being satisfied with the update as a subscriber to the CC Photography plan. Please restore the import functionality. It was really quite straight-forward. I could directly manage the entire import process from one screen, including selectively applying presets, and the thumbnails were not obscured by large check-marks.

I find it remarkable that the vast majority of the dissatisfaction with the update is focused on the import process considering all of the other top-flight functionality within LR. But as primarily a database for photo file management, losing control, or pretext of control, of importing photos while adding data to and changing the data for them while importing reduces value of the database management concept.

Thanks for the link, interesting information concerning the management’s need to attract more users because financial figures are below the predictions.

And the author is right about another thing: Like with him with Photo Mechanic, my shots don’t start in LR either but I use Breeze Browser for quick rating/tagging … that’s why the removal of “move” really hurts. If Adobe wants a real improvement to the import process, they should make PM/Breeze users switch to LR again. But that would still need a major speed increase when just going through the jpeg previews of the raw files, even though LR6 at least imropved a bit.

I’m here to be counted among the folks having issues with the new version of Lr. I foolishly updated Lr and regret it. When I started this message, I was in the middle of trying to import 1 (one) photo to Lr from a directory of about 1,200 photos. After 5 minutes, it finally told me I’d already imported it.

I don’t have 5 minutes to waste while waiting for a tool to work, especially when that tool worked much faster and quite adequately in the previous version. While I could certainly identify improvements that could be made to Lr, making it slower isn’t one of them.

I want to add another issue here. I don’t use CC, I refuse to rent software. I have a LR6 perpetual license. The understanding behind the perpetual license is that we don’t get updates as frequent Lightroom CC users. Fair enough. 6.1 is released, CC users get the dehaze slider, LR6 users do not. I read about people questioning that. Abode’s response was that LR6 users won’t get any new features until the next major release(LR7). 6.2 comes along and they give us the most awful interface for importing pictures. Yet, still no dehaze slider or dehaze local adjustment. What gives? They say they won’t give LR6 users anything new, but then give us the awful new import screen.

Please, please, please give us the old one back… I am shuddering to think that with the import dialogue box so badly dumbed down, what, oh what, do you have in store for the other modules? I have never been unhappy with LR before this.

The current version looks like something you’d have on an iPad for a child, not for pro and serious photographers on their grunty machines that handle thousands of images at a time. To think that as a tutor I recently, just before the update, demonstrated LR to a workshop going over the import dialogue and none of my students found it daunting at all.

Migrating from Aperture to Lightroom was not easy, but at least there was a logic to the file system. The “simplification” in the new interface actually makes it harder to understand. Please bring back the previous import options, which I depend on to organise my files.

One thing that have not fixed for me is the ability to import several cards and don’t wait for each one to be process to DNG for the next one to start importing. I have to import my cards in Raw format and then transform all pictures to DNG and this step I feel is not necessary . I think Lihgroom should give priority to move the files to the Library and then do the DNG transformation after.

I’m going to skip over the well documented compliant’s about this fiasco of an update.
All I want to know are two things.
How do I roll back to the pre-‘updated’ version?
When will you be fixing this obviously flawed version?

We used Adobe Creative Suite (latest was CS6 Production Premium) until the subscription scam was introduced. We will continue to use CS6 as it is, while looking for alternatives. We will never RENT our software.

We bought Acrobat XI Pro licenses last year, but soon after abandoned that path because Acrobat is also going the CC way.

Personally I stuck with LR 5.7.1 (perpetual) while contemplating to upgrade to LR 6 (perpetual). Then this happened…

Adobe, we really don’t care if you roll back to the old import dialog and fix the bugs. These business decisions you have made makes it clear to us that something is very wrong at a management level.

So, Adobe, we’re done with you. You will not get another cent from us. Thanks for the many years.

Appreciate the apology, so now PLEASE get onto fixing it. I am extremely frustrated and have several issues with the new dialogue box:
1. I just want the old box back, it was close to perfect for me.
2. I don’t want a giant picture of trees across my screen, I’m in a creative mindset that doesn’t need to be broken by your tree picture.
3. I can’t see the type of pictures to be imported, TiF, JPG, RAW, this is a disaster tying to select images.
4. It’s very difficult to differentiate between photo’s already imported or not, I have to hover my mouse over to see a tick on every single image to be sure? Much more difficult.
5. Naming the subfolder, before I could see exactly how the name of my new subfolder lined up inside the folder structure, I could see naming mistakes before they happened, now I need to check inside a search box to see the folder structure naming.
6. An extra screen? Don’t need the basic dumbed down tree screen, now I have more to think about, a more confusing set of steps.
7. The overall interface is just not as clearly defined, options not so easily available, less visually quick to find settings and information.
8. I m on LR6 not CC, one reason I’m not convinced about CC is changes like this, if the Adobe product goes in a direction I don’t like in the future I still have choice, I don’t have to be locked in to those updates, I’m not sure how that works for me with CC.
And there’s more, PLEASE fix, give me the option of an ‘advanced’ import or something! In the meantime I’ll be reverting back to the previous level software. Thanks.

Adobe – please get your act together.
Adobe Flash already has a very bad rep. Even today there is a zero day discovered on the flash. No one likes flash anymore. Whatever chances it had, Adobe’s bad programming team has blown it.
I sincerely do not want this to happen to Lightroom. I love the software as it is, and I completely do not mind Software as a service. But what I do mind is horrible horrible bugs like the crash bug that happened. I haven’t seen the new import dialog – you know why? because Lighroom did not start at all for me. I never went past the splash screen. My bad that I updated as soon as it was available.
It really was a bad software update that somehow coincided with El capitan release, but I seriously hope that Adobe again listens to the Photographers and does not let the Lightroom go the Flash way. We love your software, please return the favor and give us the proper functioning and optimal functioning Lightroom.
I hope your Flash programmers and Lightroom programmers aren’t shared – Sincerely. I am sure the Flash guys are a bunch of hugely demotivated folks. Sorry.

Why was the import “daunting”? I don’t get it. I have been a LR user since its inception, but based on all the feedback I have been reading, I am not going to upgrade by CC Photographers Edition. Please fix the bugs, fix the performance, and put the import dialog functionality back. Thank you.

The clock is ticking: I’ve already installed a Capture One trial version; my CC subscription runs through July 2016, so, sufficient time to migrate everything. If no fix is released by the end of October, I’m afraid that I will end up by saying “bye bye Adobe”, and never return. I believe that I’m not the only one.

Correct. Supposedly a Fix for the debacle of the change in the import dialog is on it’s way “This Week”. When and If it arrives, this week or next, IF it DOES NOT HAVE THE ORIGINAL import dialog re-instated I will cancel my subscription That Day.

Simple fact is, at least as I see it, you Don’t completely Change how people get their images into LR on a POINT RELEASE Version.
This was just Total Arrogance on the LR TEAM thinking.

Agree absolutely. Although I have been using Photo Mechanic for years for really big shoots (1,000+), I now use it for everything. I downloaded Capture One and still have a few days left before I have to pull the purchase trigger. I will lose my Smart Collections, but that is the price I am willing to pay.
Tom Hogarty? Are you feeling us?
A new version, with the bugs all fixed and the complete, old Import dialogue back no later than tomorrow, Friday, October 16, 2015, 18:00 CEDT, or a lot of your customers are gone for good. I am not the only one who thinks that ten (10) working days is more than enough time to fix this mess you created in your arrogance.

Your latest update has completely screwed up Lightroom ( all my other applications working perfectly I should add ). Everything slowing to a crawl. I am on deadline and just can’t work. Maybe time I learnt to master Capture One, with its new catalogue system.

Actions such as this were EXACTLY my fear when we were pushed towards the Cloud based product….Getting you hooked in then showing total contempt!
The best part about Lightroom, and a huge selling point, was its import and library management capability. If this has been dumbed down, that is a primary reason for subscribing removed…I am already working with Topaz suit and other software for greater control over editing..I’ll see how this pans out but it may well be time to turn to Photo Mechanic as the import engine.

The more I look at the new Import Dialog, the more dismayed I become over the logic at Adobe. As a silly complaint, I am wondering why the Import and Cancel buttons moved to the top? If the Thumbnails slider was moved under the thumbnails where it belongs, the new “stylish” Import and Cancel buttons could have been positioned where we have all become accustomed to finding them. In my workflow, I start on the left, move to the center, and then work my way down the right side panels until I reach the bottom and then click Import. I know, this is silly but why did they do this? Hundreds or thousands of us are used to the buttons being on the bottom right. Why move them.

To me, this blatant disregard for the workflows of the majority of their users is an indication of Adobe’s total policy change. You went to homes with new users to see what is easy? Really? OMG! I can only imagine what other powerful tools in Lightroom will be getting a new “pretty” but totally less powerful overhaul.

If Adobe really needed this new Import Interface, fine! Why, when you click on the gear to turn on the right side panels, are many of the features missing? No more Rename Example? Does this really make it easier for new users? I think showing what is going to happen with the imported filenames would be helpful to and easier for new users.

No more Italicized display of subfolders to see where exactly they are being placed? Does this really make it easier for new users? I think showing where imported images are going would be helpful to and easier for new users.

Now, if I select a photo for import, you can no longer see the photo because there is a large obnoxious check across the front and middle of the thumbnail. Does this really make it easier for new users? I think showing the photos with a checkbox in the corner would be more helpful to and easier for new users.

Now, if I want to Import and then Import again, I have to manually eject my memory cards. Did removing this really make it easier for new users? I think offering this with a checkbox would be more helpful to and easier for new users who may forget to eject and corrupt data still in the cache.

I agree that I have some tools I use every day and others I only use occasionally. That does not mean I want the tool manufacturer to take them away, especially since I paid for them. In Lightroom, I can count on one hand the number of times I have needed to use “Increase Flag Status” or “Decrease Flag Status”. I use “P”, “X”, or “U” and it works just fine and I find it quicker. Will Adobe remove these commands? Who knows any more?

In short, it is hard for me to believe that this is really about making it easier for new or home users. Okay, perhaps the first Add Photos screen is helpful to new users and it is great that the ability to turn it off is great as well but why oh why did making it easier for these “potential” new users make changing the rest of the Import Dialog necessary when you had to suspect many of us power users would be devastated by the removal of so much functionality.

I teach Lightroom classes for hundreds of amateurs and professionals and as far as I am concerned this did not make it easier for anyone. Seems like a silly way to treat your loyal customers.

Lightroom is now totally unuseable for me.
Some things I’ve noticed (running on Win 10 64-bit) with the stand-alone version 6.2.1
– Each time I click, on a menu, on a slider, I get “Not Responding” in the window title, a pause, and then I get to experience one command working, then it happens all over again;
– Everything is moving at glacial speed (actually I don’t feel comfortable using “speed” in this sentence).
If I could ask for one “NEW” feature in Lightroom it would be a “Roll-Back a version” button, that I could employ after getting stomped by an update.

Tom, thanks for answering to this thread, but to be honest I think you clearly missed the point. People are not upsat about certain bugs (while this is another story), they are upset about the fact that several vital functions have been withdrawn from a, so far, product for professionals. Somne years ago, I was also a “beginner”, but never found the important function being not intuitive or 2 complex to handle. If somebody form your marketing or whatever stufff told you something like that, I only can say bullsh..t. And if you want to adress beginners, you could have choosing to implement kind of LR functionality into PS Elements or add a layer to LR that allows users to choose between an “expert mode” or a “beginner mode”.
I decided a while ago to subscribe to your Cloud solution, but now I’m recondering this, as I have the feeling that you start to act like Apple a while ago, when they lost focus on their professional users. That worked for a while, but now?
So if your apology is meant to be serious, listen to your customers and and bring back the original import functionality.

Well, I’ve rolled back to 6.1.1 and am working away like normal (for me).

I have amended my course notes to include a demo of how to “Roll Back to ver…?”. My students laugh when I tell them “war stories”.
It’s ironic that one of the things that OnOne is pushing with their version 10 is a better Browser/Management.

May I humbly suggest that you restore the useful features you have removed from Import but place them in the advanced options behind the gear icon. That way experienced users can take advantage of them and confused newbies can stick with a dumbed-down version of import.

This is the first time in the history of LR that I have cautioned my students against updating. I don’t like being in that position at all, but the radical and unexpected changes have forced me to take a wait and see approach to figure out if Adobe really is removing those features forever or if the hue and cry of your existing users might change some minds at Adobe HQ.

Adobe, I have to say that you really screwed up this time. The Export and Import dialog/tools have been incredibly unstable since the last release. It has really hindered the progress of my wedding deliveries. I understand that you’re trying to dumb down your software for people who use your software for leisure or amateur purposes but please think about those who use your tool to make a living. Fork your code and create a version for amateurs or something. The last week or so of using Lightroom has been very frustrating. Please, can you create a feature to turn off immediate scanning of drives/folders on launching Import tool. I know where my photos are and will select the folder myself without the software scanning my drives/folders for photos.

From taking a look at your new Import dialog, it shows that you are trying to dumb it down for non-professional users while disregarding professionals. You could pls just create a different version or something.

Thanks Tom. In my opinion your quality control practices from pre-subscription era, maybe, haven’t caught up with your plans for more frequent releases and the software quality has been slipping on a number of fronts. Which really isn’t an improvement, on balance, compared to the old model where we received features less frequently. Reliability is the MOST important feature, not just something you check you have covered after ditzing around adding new features IMHO 😉

I can’t believe Photoshop CC 2015 still is unable to use the 6 Filter menu slot, a daft bug since July ! In fact that update was very disruptive considering the features added (same of all the CC updates TBH). I really didn’t think the incremental update model promised by CC would be so disruptive. And now Lightroom is a victim of the same thing.

Regarding simplify Lightroom, please branch off the main product and do a Lightroom Elements.

This is great software you’ve created but please treat that legacy with the same respect many of us have for it.

p.s. you guys already lost my Illustrator business to the very good Sketch. Your inflexible pricing model and bouncy ride as a user pushed me over the edge. I still OWN an Ai CS6 license, but wouldn’t subscribe in future.

… of course this current situation with updates isn’t improved by the Creative Cloud app keeping telling me I have updates to install for Acrobat DC (which I don’t even own). Same for my purchased copy of Photoshop CS6 Extended, which CC suddenly decided it wants to update after years of being ignored by CC.

Finally my purchased copy of Premiere CS 6 is now redundant and I am switching over to FCX. CC has been a disaster for me. Leaving Ai and Pr was tough and the Photography plan is the only thing I intend to continue with. It’s a great deal as it turns out.

The very first one: i wish the speed of photo mechanic to check (star-rating) thousands of images in real time. I have no idea why a small company like camerabits makes this possible from the beginning and other big companies did not.

And the other ones are:
– to configure the fields of iptc/exif. It costs a lot of time to scroll for every image to the fields i need (see good example like Aperture).
– improvement of publish services for ftp (see photo mechanics)
– UI Design is really chaotic, to much lines and rectangles. The image is important and not the things around or nowadays inside like the worse example of the new import dialog.
– and the last and for me the most important thing: a light-table like in Aperture, where i can simulate an exhibition or a layout or where i can put together a story. This is a real amazing feature. And i don´t know any other software than Aperture where i can get this feature.

I would concur with the above with the ‘dumbing down’ of the import screen. I guess you done this to encourage elements users to subscribe to a photography plan. In this process you have annoyed a lot of professional users.

I have a real problem with the new version (including the fix). All of my previews come up black. No matter what I do I can’t get them to show. I have imported the pictures to two separate computers, both with the latest update, and both have the problem. My pictures come from a Fuji XT1.

Come on Adobe, you have really messed up a great and previously stable product, aesthetics are not worth the hassle to your customers. Get it fixed please!!!!

John, please uncheck “apply auto-tone adjustments” in Preferences->Presets. There is a bug in 2015.2.x /6.2.x with that enabled. It will apply a -5 exposure adjustment to newly imported images if that’s enabled – turning all your images pure black. On already imported images, you should be able to reset them to get them back to normal.

I cannot help but comment on some of the bugs: This particular one shows that Adobe themselves don’t use auto-tone, and for a good reason. The results are still unpredictable at best comparing to the old PV2010, and it certainly doesn’t care about trying to recover highlights even if they’re “hidden” in the raw file – seems to be tuned for jpeg :-p. Still, if Adobe is going LR Elements, there’s plenty of work left until the “one-click” Mickey Mouse import->autotone->facebook button is ready for primetime.

In all fairness, the 6.2.0 release was most likely botched because the management insisted on a release in time for a big public event stunt.

But it’s the “little” bugs that make me worry if Adobe actually really uses LR or has a valid feedback channel from advanced users. One example: You can filter for “caption is empty”, but not for “title is empty” and have to resort to “title doesn’t contain a e i o u”. There’s no end to these “Ugh?” moments.

The sad thing is that general opinion is that it’s no use reporting “little” bugs because Adobe is so busy attracting new users they’ve stopped the dialog mentioned in the apology above. Let’s hope they’ve heard the wakeup call.

Tom, you promised an update by the end of the week. There is only one day left for us in the US (other parts of the world it is the end of the week). I sincerely hope you are not taking the route of politicians and government by releasing bad news at the very end of the week hoping it will slide under the radar. I would have thought that the feedback here and other forums would have been enough impetus to provide feedback already. You know, the longer we customers have to wait the more anxious we become
MK

As it has not been said by everyone, and as there seems to be an obvious problem counting what your customers want: This 6.2 release was a very poorly done. Very.
You did not make “decisions on sensible defaults”. Your process to asses what is a “very low usage feature” is obviously flawed. This is not a question of “communicating changes properly”. Changes you made were bad, regardless how you could have communicated them.
A key feature that you need to implement next is a feature to postpone any updates until a date chosen by the user, without bugging him in the CC update function with information on a new release. Another key feature would have to be a “risk factor section”, in addition to the usual marketing noise, warning users what the next update might get them into, and what adverse effects it will have on workflow.
This 6.2 release was a very poorly done. Very.

I was shocked to find my workflow for importing photos was totally disrupted with the latest creative cloud update. I generally do a quick tag and rename my photos outside lightroom and then import into a new catalog. Now I can’t see the folders easily and file names have disappeared from the import dialog unless you waste time mousing over the images (at least I couldn’t fine a way to turn them back on). Please at least provide an option to include display of filenames beneath the thumbnails when viewing in the import dialog. I’ve been using Lightroom for years and haven’t forgotten the feeling of joy in completing most of my photo edits for a job in a fraction of the time. This is the first instance when I’ve felt like an update was a major step in the wrong direction.

I don’t mind change. And I am sure some of this will grow on me but I Will Miss the auto eject feature from Lightroom. I know cards infrequently get corrupted by not properly ejecting them, but I use a 50mp and 42mp camera for stills and shoot ton of 4K. The stills go to light room the 4 k footage goes to a different program and computer. Without the auto eject I have a higher chance of corrupted files. Again I know the chances are low but I do not want to have to re shoot all or part of a day. I also don’t want to kill my 128 and 256 cards they are cheap. Auto eject gave me price of mind.

Lightroom has become completely unusable for me literally ONE WEEK since subscribing to CC. It seems my hesitations in subscribing were correct. At this point, I have grave concerns with continuing at all with Adobe.

It’s good to recognise not enough thought went into this release and to acknowledge it shouldn’t have happened. However, if you think dumbing down the import module is in any way acceptable to the user base you remain deluded.
I don’t use that functionality every import but I value it highly because when it is required it is necessary. If you’ve been somehow convinced the import module is holding back people from using Lightroom, you’ve been sold snake oil.
Personally, I won’t be updating until the import module is returned to its previous format.

Tom,
As everyone above has mentioned, I use all the features in the previous version. I work as a TA in a Lightroom class at USC and am consequently fluent in Lightroom. When the update came out I could not figure out how to get my photos to go where I wanted them to go. Students in the class as well as the professor are having trouble importing. Please bring back the old menu. Pretty is not always better.

“Customers were universally unable to decipher the Import dialog without getting frustrated. Some people pushed forward, bolstered by spending time searching the web for help. They might have been successful in importing files, but they didn’t feel successful. Others gave up, deciding that Lightroom might not be the right product for them.”

This is now what we have to do to import our photos. I think that the update is not decipherable. This was a bad move bring back all the menus!!!!

Tom, $9.99 vs. $10.99
Quality and Service sell. Why didn’t you just raise the price for the next few years???. If you give us better tools to sell our image related products, we would sell you software for you! Word of mouth is a powerful tool. In my short 40+ years in manufacturing professional products, I have learned the hard way that value to the customer is more important than price. Give us back our professional tools; and then add more we can use to impress our customers. Your products (and mine) are only tools. Your professional customers WILL look for other tools to do the job.
Bob G.

Where’s the apology for 6.2.1? It’s worse on my system than 6.2 and still has import issues. Adobe has once again proven that they don’t care about their customers. An apology doesn’t compensate us for all of the headaches, downtime and frustration over this garbage software update! How long until we get another update to fix the previous two updates that are complete crap?

Tom, you claim you and your team are working hard to earn our trust back. We want you to work smart. Please return to the former import module. Short of doing this you will make the delights of competitors.

Don’t sweat it, plenty of time left until 23:59:59 on the Baker Islands @-12UTC 🙂

But really, the lack of immediate calming responses from Adobe shows that they’re taking this seriously. You have to appreciate their dilemma: Their code quality seems to have grown so bad they’re unable to iron out long-time bugs or increase performance significantly – restarting LR is common practice. They’re so desperate they’d rather remove “if (pref_move) { move $file } else { copy $file }” to reduce complexity. At the same time, management obviously makes them stuff more and more “big” features in to LR.

The way out? Adobe please revert the import disaster at least by re-adding all “lost” options and talk to your existing users. Then take a year “big” feature time out and concentrating on fixing bugs and improving the core workflow – for example by looking what popular plugins add to LR.

Horrible performance issues on my end. Painfully slow, as in 60 sec for reaction to a button click, no trying to download the previous version. It’s ridiculous to release a version like this and the impact it has on professionals.

I’ve never known any update to quite so comprehensively destroy my faith in both the software and the vendor. A total debacle, Lightroom is for all purposes now unusable. 10 Hours to import 600 photos form a shoot, followed by a crash. Crashing roughly every third photograph in grading….and to think I was seriously thinking of moving to creative cloud. PhotoMechanic has solved the cataloguing issue, Capture One looks promising.

I’d like to join the above with my concern with the performance issues and bugs over the years with LR. I invest a lot in hardware, but this cannot keep up with the demands of the software… I’m using LR from 2008 and was very satisfied with this program.
I’m an (sports)event photographer and have to process a lot of images per day (1000 to 4000) and for my workflow now fully dependable on LR, but since version 5 more and more performance issues and bugs. So I have to be very carefully to switch to other modules in LR now, mostly restarting LR before switching to avoid buggy behavior. I’m normally a very loyal user, but these issues trigger me to spent time on investigating to switch to alternatives.. So Adobe please listen and act on all issues as listed in all these comments and reinstall our trust in you. Many thanks in advance.

6:20 PM and Friday where I live. I’m really looking forward to hear what Tom has to say. In particular I want to hear about the future direction of LR. If there is even a hint of a dumbing down future I’m out. Why the hell would I want to pay for that?

Tom and Adobe – I hope you read this and take it in good faith. When a big company, like yourselves, that has earned a huge amount of trust through solid work treats customers and our work (!!) like you have in recent times you make small shops like Serif, Bohemian Coding, Alien Skin (next Exposure version will be a mini-Lightroom) look more and more attractive. Like much safer pairs of hands for our work and money.

As I mentioned previously here, we have switched over to using Sketch instead of Illustrator without any real qualms, because relying on a small company seems a lot less of a risk now that Adobe has become a much less confidence inspiring business. Quite shockingly so, considering the amazing work done in the past by Adobe to build that vibe.

Simple idea. Until you have things ironed out, give us a quick patch back to the previous working version. It was working fine for me, and now my computer freezes every few minutes/seconds. I am beyond frustrated, and now wonder if I need to sell my Adobe stock. This has not been confidence inspiring in the company itself.

WTF, Tom! Where’s the “update” you promised us by the end of the week!?! I have two (2) shoots this weekend here in Germany, and it’s already evening here.
And why the hell haven’t you resigned yet? Falling on one’s sword used to be considered the honorable thing to do, instead of cowering behind corporate weasel words…
Either an update…that freaking works and gives us our old Import function…hits the website in less than six (6) hours or consider my $79.99 per month subscription history!
Enough is enough!

You do know you’re supposed to interact in a dialog, right? That you’re supposed to reply, answer, let us know your thoughts and ideas? Though I must admit I only came aboard with Lr 2 so I can’t judge the quality of the dialog back in 2006, right now we, your customers, are still in the dark. Had you made any decisions the past week you could already have let us know. I don’t mind waiting for a working update a bit longer as long as I know what’s going on. Right know I’m losing all confidence.

You might consider asking the bean counters that are clearly in charge these days about hiring a communication professional.

Tom,
When I first saw face recognition added, it seemed odd. What was a social media app doing in a pro photo editing software? It’s now clear where you are headed. I’ve used Photoshop since 2002 and Lightroom since 2007 (beta). Now I have to stop deleting those solicitation email ads from Capture One, DXO, On One, Photo Mechanic, Etc. and start reading their reviews.
A full featured Lightroom Pro version would be a good solution. You could add features (Layers, Levels?) and charge $2.00 a month more. Your bean counters would be happy (20% more revenue), and those on your board pushing social media could save face. I, on the other hand, would drink one less cup of coffee a month, be more heart healthy, and put the extra change in a jar for my grand kids. A real win win situation.